Hello crawlers! Welcome to the last trunk update of the 0.29 cycle. We’ll be branching off the 0.29 beta branch and rolling it out to the servers soon, in anticipation of an upcoming release and tournament starting Friday, August 26, 2022, at 8:00pm UTC. Watch this space for the tournament website soon!

As we’ve been in feature freeze for part of the time since the last update post there’s not much to report, but here’s the latest on what will round out the version. Expect to see a few more new vaults and tweaks before the beta, and don’t hesitate to report any bugs you’ve noticed. Community contributor nlavsky has continued the stream of bug fixes; riverfiend did a deep dive in god wraths and did a lot of sanity checks, big thanks to them both! Here are the rest of the changes:

• A new scroll of butterflies summons some insectoid cover, alternating in a set with the scroll of fog
• Sastrei has been hard at work drawing a slew of new tiles
• Some spell balance tweaks:
• Irradiate now applies more contamination
• Flame wave and sticky flame do more damage
• Sandblast is more accurate
• Frozen Ramparts and Ozocubu’s Refrigeration now check AC.
• Ozocubu’s Refigeration no longer applies -Potion, does more damage, but significantly reduced damage to monsters adjacent to each other (they huddle for warmth, cute!).
• Arcane Markspersons starting sling is now +1, and they trade the scroll of vulnerability for a scroll of poison.
• The roll attack of Palentonga is now quieter, and they gain +2 strength.
• A lot of behind-the-scenes work in key code handling and UI menus has been done by advil; the work has payed dividends in making new menu shortcut features easy to implement, visible in the use an item menu (toggle between wear/takeoff with !). Look forward to more of this in the next version.

Along with these gameplay changes have been a host of bug fixes as we get the next version ready for launch. Get amped for the tournament, and until next time, happy crawling!

The butterfly can only feel hate for you!

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the latest trunk updates! It’s a hot summer here in Gehenna, where the devil’s team is toiling away. Before we dive into the latest diabolical ways to die, mark your calendars. The tentative dates for the 0.29 release tournament are 26 August 2022 to 11 September. Watch this space for more information as the 0.29 development cycle winds down and we ready the new version for release.

We’ve got a big trunk update for you. Since last time we’ve added community contributions from nlavsky, robertxgray, Goratrix, Zhang Joke, Cebolla Sunbeam, chequers, perryprog, amcnicky, nikheizen, Brian Power, Aliscans, David Damerell as well as welcomed first-time contributors 4Hooves2Appendages, catern, Sentei, Reono, ruxi, and Rosstin Murphy. Some of these are bug fixes, grammar tweaks, quotations and dialog, and vaults, the little stuff that all together gives crawl its polish, but there are also some bigger-ticket items in the round up. If you’re interested in helping out with the effort to make crawl, click here for more information!

With that said, let’s dive into what’s been shaking in trunk.

First up, a new monster: the starflower, contributed by Cebolla Sunbeam. A stationary plant/tentacle hybrid monster with harpoon shot, reach 3 distortion melee, reach 2 melee, and an additional distortion melee attack. Meant as a vault-placed monster for abyssal vaults, guarding an exit or a rune or what have you, as a threat that’s dangerous to be close to, but can be neutralized if the harpoon shot can be blocked or avoided somehow.

Sentei adjusted the -Scroll and -Potion mutations. They are now 2-tier mutations in the regular bad mutation pool. The Ru sacrifice corresponds to the 2nd tier. Follwing up on Senti’s work, teleportits and berserkitis are also now two tiers.

nikheizen sent us a design to reflavour and re-mechanic gnoll shamen, turning them into gnoll bouda. They have a new spell set: Weakening Gaze, Hunting Call (like battlecry but gives swiftness instead of might), and heal other. The name bouda is a nod to the bouda of Northeast African folklore: shapeshifters that turn into jackals. They have the power of the Evil Eye which curses others with spectacular misfortune.

Temples are adjusted to place six to twenty-one altars, with a distribution that lightly favors the center of that range. On a one percent chance, a rare temple is selected instead. Rare temples are to Lugonu, Jiyva, or Ignis, or have a particularly extreme number of altars. Designing a Temple map is a great way to start contributing: there’s a particular need for Temples that support 7-8, 11, 17, 19, or 20 altars. Read more about map making for crawl here!

Support for item reskins has been added. Crazy Yiuf’s has his hammers once more. Sigmund and Reapers’ scythes are now reskinned halberds (so you can actually use them if you want, instead of trap items), and all scythes except unrand scythes are removed.

The Bows, Crossbows, and Slings skills are combined into a single Ranged Combat skill. Fustibali are removed. Hunting slings are renamed to slings. Launcher stats and spawn rates and locations are adjusted to give the ranged skill greater strategic depth.

Continuing to build on the item rotation concept, there is a new item: wand of roots, appears in item rotation with iceblast. Roots fires a 3×3 fireball-sized effect which constricts its victims (like BVC), with a duration scaling with wand power.

And a grab bag of slightly smaller changes:

• a new silent ossuary map
• Jiyva altars now place 2/3rds of the time at the entrance to Slime
• Hex miscasts now only slow the player, instead of also cancelling effects
• Lair now 5 floors
• Ijyb’s wand power is nerfed.

That’s all for now. Expect the changes to slow down as we arrive into feature freeze in August and get ready for the release. Until next time, happy crawling!

Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?

Hello crawlers, and welcome back to Trunk Updates. While I’ve been away in a far corner of Pandemonium, my fellow devils have slacked off and left this space blank! Well, not slacked exactly, because they’ve been hard at work in Tar:7, as the length of this post portends. There have been several big moves, in the direction of item sets, a necromancy overhaul, and a new species, as well as balance adjustments following the opportunity attacks change and of course a wild grab bag of other changes. Before we dive into those, let’s mention community contributions since we last wrote: dilly sent in several new guarded unrand vaults, sdynet tweaked the rings of the Octopus King, and Aliscans, chequers, nlavsky, perryprog, and spicyCebolla each sent in various fixes and adjustments. I know there’s a big backlog of pull requests on the GitHub right now, but with luck we’ll bring in a bunch more new community work in the next month. Until then, let’s look at the rest of the changes!

Item sets

In an effort to increase run-to-run variation, experiment with new interesting item effects, while not increasing item pressure, the new notion of an item set is introduced. Only one type of item from a set can generate normally in a given game (though certain special situations, like rare vaults or shops, or perhaps a forgotten god, might bend this rule). Currently there are two item sets:

• The hex wand set: alternating between Paralysis and Charming.
• The bolt wand set: alternating between Acid, and two new wands: Light and quicksilver.
• wands of light fire a bolt of blinding light, checking AC and EV but no resists. The beam blinds what it hits, and deals  damage identical to an acid wand.
• wands of quicksilver fires a quicksilver bolt, dispelling the magical effects of targets it hits. Does slightly more damage than acid.

Watch this space for future exciting item sets!

Corpseless necromancy

As foreshadowed in the last post, hellmonk and PleasingFungus have been hard at work on overhauling Necromancy to not use corpses directly, as well as make Necromancy less awkward to use and give Kikubaaqudagh some bone polish. Their efforts have paid off, and crawl’s Necromantic magic now deals directly in the shadow between life and death, instead of meddling with the long-dead.

• Kikubaaqudgha is buffed:
• The pain brand can be applied to ranged weapons.
• Torment no longer requires a corpse sacrifice.
• Corpse Delivery is removed and replaced with Unearth Wretches, which summons some paralysed, 1 HP, 0 will monsters that die in a few turns, to use Necromancy spells on.
• Animate Dead now gives a duration, and for the duration killed monsters with corpses have a power-dependent chance to become zombies. The zombies are permanent as long as the player is on the level, and are destroyed by a subsequent cast of Animate Dead.
• Simulacrum is now a smite-targeted spell that gives an irresistable status. Monsters that die with this status spawn a power-dependent number of simulacra.
• Death Channel cannot be re-cast while active.
• Corpse Rot is now Level 4 Necromancy/Poison/Air. When cast it produces miasma for each corpse-producing monster killed in sight, scaling with power.
• New Spell: Necrotize (L1 Necromancy). Necrotize deals damage identically to the old Pain spell, but additionally gives the monster a short-lived status that causes it to animate as a skeleton on death (if it has a skeleton). It replaces Animate Skeleton and Pain in all player usable places.
• The spells Animate Skeleton, Pain, and Excruciating Wounds are removed.

Meteorae

The roiling success of hellmonk’s April fools Mayflytaurs’s mechanic comes back in a modified form. Welcome Meteorae!

Meteorae have an exciting variety of bonuses – great attributes and aptitudes across the board, passive mapping, and exploration healing, regaining HP and MP when viewing new territory. In exchange, they have one big downside: instead of getting 6,000 turns of Zot clock for each floor, they get 600! Meteorae are humanoid beings. (In the night sky, they look like dots because they’re very far up.) Hat tip to Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. They also glow in the dark, with permanent backlit status (not halo!), that they can’t escape by transmuting (Dithmenos can hide them, though!).

Along with their introduction comes a softening of the Zot clock, a slight move away from “instant death”. The Zot clock now applies very heavy draining the first time it trips, and gives the player an additional set of turns. Only at very low max HP will it outright kill the player.

Balance adjustments

The introduction of attacks of opportunity was a significant shift, and there have been several follow up changes to adjust balance while keeping the tighter tactics they introduce.

• Some early game monsters are nerfed a bit in terms of base damage.
• Consumable generation is increased.
• Monsters slower than the player don’t get opportunity attacks.
• The maximum duration of paralysis a monster can inflict is reduced to 5 turns.
• Dungeon shafts attempt to send the player to a location outside of LOS of monsters.
• Using all un-explored stairs and hatches is now fast.

The rest

Of course, this wouldn’t be a trunk updates post without a potpourri of other assorted changes. First of all, advil has done a host of behind the scenes work, improving the shopping menu, the plumbing of various bits of UI and save handling. And of course, Sastreii’s artistic endeavors continue to beautify the dungeon as well as clarify UI elements: you might have noticed the flashy new status icons for various status effects that are applied to monsters. Read on for the rest:

• Timed hell effects no longer apply on a timer, and instead have a chance to apply on each level entry.
• Hunter‘s starting dexterity is increased.
• Positive stat mutations now give +4 to the primary stat and -1 to the other two.
• Formicids’ base dexterity is increased by 3.
• Formicids  can now wield giant (spiked) clubs.
• Demonspawn demonic touch damage is doubled.
• Uskayaw grants piety for ally damage.
• Lugonu’s Bend Space is adjusted. It no longer does damage, and makes a better effort to blink monsters away from the destination.
• Stones always mulch when thrown.
• Shadow dragon scales AC increased
• Weapon descriptions now display a “damage rating“, describing the contributions to weapon damage from various sources.
• New item: scroll of poison. When read the scroll of poison fills every unoccupied space on the screen with poison clouds for 10-20 turns.
• +MP items remove MP when they are taken off.
• New unrand: the +8 trishula “Condemnation” {holy, Anguish Fly rN+}. Inflicts 4-8 turns of the Anguish status on targets it hits.
• New unrand: the +3 mountain boots {rDislodge, rC+}. Prevent the player from being involuntarily moved by physical means (trampling, shafts, tentacles, etc.).
• The amulet of Vitality now gives two pips each of Regen and RegenMP, and is now evil (Borgnjor is said to have made or used it or been involved in it somehow).
• Scrolls of holy word are removed
• Animated Armour now flies.
• Sandblast no longer uses stones as ammo. Instead it takes twice as long to cast as a normal spell, and has its range increased by one.
• Airstrike’s bonus from empty space is doubled.
• Finally, Deep Dwarves are removed.

Wow! It’s been a few months since we last wrote and a lot has happened. Still more is on the horizon, though through the haze what exactly remains as mercurial as a quicksilver elemental. So, until next time, happy crawling!

Whisper “Farewell” when you leave, Dimli…

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the first trunk update post of the 0.29 development cycle. The dust has settled from the 0.28 tournament, and a bug fix release for 0.28 will appear soon. Meanwhile, trunk development has taken off as various members of the team and the community get to work on new exciting projects. First off we have several new vaults by community contributors DreamDust, and spicyCebolla, as well as tweaks, fixes, and text from Antern, chequers, CipHuk, Elliot Bernstein, Diego Essaya, Implojin, perryprog, and robertxgray. Many thanks to the community contributors that keep crawl alive and healthy! Now let’s turn to the gameplay changes since 0.28.

Launcher ammo is removed

You read that correctly: player launchers now have unlimited ammo. Along with this are changes and tweaks to bring balance in this new, free firing world:

• ranged weapons have had their stats adjusted downward
• the Hunter background no longer starts with a short sword and no longer has a throwing option
• Kobolds now have +3 crossbows aptitude
• Armour penalties apply to ranged weapon attack delay
• Launcher damage scales with dex instead of str
• Spriggans can no longer wield triple crossbows, and fustibali are 2-handed.

Several new Uniques stalk the dungeon

• Parghit the Mighty. Following the example of Maggie/Margery, Parghit is an “alt-timeline” version of Pargi. Parghit appears in late Depths, Zot, Crypt and Tomb, and sports high-enchantment golden dragon scales (with a 1% chance of wearing the Dragon King) and an astonishing 27 HP regenerated per turn. He’s definitely killable, but best not underestimated.
• Josephina the Ice-Lich. As one more “alt-timeline” unique, Josephina is an upgraded version of Josephine. She appears in late Vaults, Depths, Crypt, Tomb, and Zot, and borrows Wendigo Seracfall (turning simulacrula into 3d33 bombs) to add to her classic Ghostly Fireball. She comes with a guaranteed randart ring of ice.
• Amaemon the Diabolical Poisoner. Crawl’s first demonspawn unique, appearing in mid-D, early Lair and Orc:1. Alongside his orange demon companion, Amaemon summons scorpions (the classic returns!) and casts Concentrate Venom, upgrading his allies’ poison into curare. To encourage players to try to kill him, he wields a demon whip of venom, with 1% chance of the unique Snakebite.
• Lodul the Thundrous. Lodul is an ironbound thunderhulk who’s been sent to patrol outside the Vaults, in late D. He’s got a weaker version of Call Down Lightning and a big band of ogres and two-headed ogres to help him keep distance from the player. Defensively, he looks a lot like Erolcha.
• Vv the Exile. Vv is a combination of ironbound frosthearts (Creeping Frost) and Salamander Tyrants (Eruption/Pyroclastic Surge), appearing in Depths, Zot, Crypt, and Tomb. She’s themed as a new species, the Stoneborn, sentient earth elementals. She also has strong defenses and both flaming and cold melee.
• Zenata, Seeker of Sheza. Zenata is another late-game unique (appearing in Depths, Zot &c), borrowing a bit from the Desolation of Salt and putting a twist on it. She’s taken the ragged hierophants’ “Resonance Strike”, which is like airstrike that gets bonus damage from adjacent constructs instead of from open spaces, and uses it in conjuction with a new “Sheza’s Dance” spell, which summons 2-4 dancing weapons. She comes with a high-tier weapon with some plusses already on it.

Monster energy and attacks of opportunity

A major mechanical change has landed in trunk. “Random energy” was introduced long ago in Stone Soup’s history as an attempt at deterring tedious-but-optimal levels of pillar dancing and luring, while permitting shorter trips. It has not been successful in that role, and additionally offered a “get out of jail free-ish” card in many fights against certain monsters. The spirit that motivated it also motivated previous devteam attempts to meet the problem with a better solution, such as the dynamic-monsters experimental during the 0.17 cycle. This time around we’re tinkering with the mechanic again, in the following form:

• Monster move energy is no longer randomized.
• Monsters adjacent to the player gain a 1/3 chance to gain a free* attack if the player moves away from them. Wu Jian martial attacks & rampaging give immunity, and monsters that don’t move fast enough to follow you can’t attack. *Terms and conditions apply: the monster must have sufficient energy to be able to move the next turn (monsters slower than the player don’t get this chance on the turn they fall behind), and monsters that attack slowly don’t get a full refund on the energy used for the attack, only the amount of a normal turn.
• Ogres, 2-headed Ogres, Ogre magi, and Thunderhulks attack more slowly in melee.
• Early D spawns are nerfed a bit, with top killers less common and Harold moved later.

In addition to the direct tuning changes above, backgrounds have their starting kits improved a bit with extra consumables, to increase tactical options in the very early game. See the next section.

Expanded starting kits

Many backgrounds get improved starting kits with a new consumable or two to help with the very earliest moments of the game when tactical options are limited.

• All ‘mages’ (‘pure casters’) start with a potion of magic.
• Gladiators get a throwing weapon (one); a javelin, large rock, or boomerang.
• Monks get a potion of ambrosia.
• Hunters get a scroll of immolation.
• Brigands get an additional poisoned & curare dart.
• Artificers trade their chesspiece for nine charges of iceblast.
• Wanderers get an additional random potion or scroll.
• Abyssal Knights start at 60 piety (just over 2*) instead of 38 (just over 1*). This should allow them to use Bend Space if needed.
• Chaos Knights get Artificer’s xom chesspiece.
• Transmuters get a potion of lignification.
• Warpers get more boomerangs of dispersal.
• Arkane Markspersons get a scroll of vulnerability.
• Enchanters get another potion of invisibility.

Everything else

Along with big-ticket changes there’s the usual froth and fizz of trunk development, with little tweaks and small features all over.

• Unrand tweaks:
• the Glaive of the Guard is reduced to +5
• the arbalest “Dammnation” is reduced to firing 2d14 explosions
• Gyre & Gimble are now +12
• the Woodcutter’s axe is now a battleaxe
• Long and short blade damage scales with Dexterity instead of Strength.
• Merfolk’s polearms aptitude is reduced to +3, with long blades increased to +2
• Mummy necromancy enhancers now appear at XL 3 and 13
• Most zombies and skeletons are removed from Dungeon generation.

That’s all for now! The team is still getting organized around 0.29 priorities, so through the haze of Gehenna it’s hard to make out what’s coming. One big project is an overhaul of Necromancy, particularly the corpse exploitation spells; it’s still in the early phases so keep an eye out to see what sort of dark abomination comes out of the work. Until next time, happy crawling!

The trunk updates hit you as you move away! Ouch! That really hurt!!! You die…

We’re in the process of finalizing the 0.28 release which will appear in the next couple of days, and 0.28 is being rolled out to our online servers.

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the first trunk update of the new year! As hinted in the previous update, the 0.28 development cycle is nearing a close, and with that we are pleased to announce a tentative tournament start date of Friday, February 4, 2022, at 20:00 UTC for the sixteen day 0.28 Release tournament. We are chilling trunk into a feature freeze and will be focusing on bug fixes and balance in the coming three weeks, and plan to release 0.28 before the start of the tournament. More details about the tournament, including a tournament website and rules changes, will be available here soon!

With that announced, let’s dive into the 215 commits that have arrived in trunk since the start of the year (more or less). These commits included community contributions from Aliscans, DreamDust, Zhang Kai, perryprog, nlavsky, Goratrix, and a new rare Temple layout featuring Ignis by pdpol. In total, in these commits were 72 bug fixes spread among GitHub issues, Mantis issues, reports directly to the devteam, and community contributions to fix a bug the fixer noticed. Along side the polish and gameplay balance, UI improvements are always something we’re happy to include, and team member advil has done extensive work to make arrow keys and menu help more consistently available across the UI.

The last “big ticket” block of changes to land was to the Abyss, let’s open with that suite of changes:

• Random items no longer generate in the abyss.
• Kills in the abyss grant no reward (experience and piety), though Uskayaw still rewards damage and Yred still grants zombies.
• Exploring no longer grants piety in the abyss.
• The chance of plunging deeper into the abyss on teleport is increased.
• Wretched stars only apply a single temporary mutation per use of corrupting pulse, and use it less often.
• The abyssal rune, staircases, and exits are more common.
• On collecting the abyssal rune, the player gains two potions of experience worth of experience.

With two-hundred commits there’s still a lot of churn, and although at this stage we’re much more focused on balance, there’s also a new goody or two. Let’s dive in!

• New spell: Anguish (L4 Hex/Necromancy). Gives monsters in sight that fail a Will check the anguished status. Whenever an anguished monster deals damage it also takes the same amount of damage.
• Shield penalties now work more like armour skill; the penalty scales down as skill is increased from 0 up to 27, based on a shield encumbrance rating and species factor. Skill 27 is required to completely remove the penalty, regardless of size.
• Spider is no longer quiet, and completely open level layouts are much rarer
• Ghost moths toned down in melee
• orbs of mayhem are now disliekd by Cheibriados, and energy disliked by Trog
• the robe of Misfortune loses its unequip penalties
• Ashenzari’s skill boost is turned down
• Wendigo’s seracfall damage is reduced
• To-hit penalties from armour and shields are removed
• Aux attack chance and damage is now based on XL instead of attribute for all aux attacks.
• Offhand punch chance now starts at 5% chance and scales with unarmed combat skill to 50% at max skill.
• Dragon form gets 2 extra levels of fangs.
• The UI for interacting with frenzied monsters is greatly improved.
• The player gets XP for kills by and of frenzied monsters.
• Jiyva no longer grants piety for exploring the slime pits
• The poison dart generation rate is dropped
• Assorted tweaks to Spider monster band mixes and sizes

Well, that’s all for now! If you’re interested in helping in the release effort, drop us a line in #crawl-dev on libera.chat, check out the open issues on GitHub, or just keep playing and discussing trunk as the balance and tuning come in.

On the horizon, well, I opened with it. There’s the 0.28 Release and Tournament! The team is going to be focusing on getting release-ready in the next 3 weeks. Until next time, happy crawling!

The trunk update hits you! The trunk update is wracked by anguish!!! The trunk update dies!

A ho ho ho from Santaeus here in the icy expanse of Cocytus the North Pole! Welcome to the last trunk update of 2021. The frenzied pace of trunk development continues, with 150 commits since we last wrote. One big chunk of commits was some behind the scenes web tiles modernization, with some help from CKO admin and community contributor floraline. There are three big headliner sets of changes: a new set of Spider monsters, a variety of new early-game appearing unrands, and a new type of item to carry in your offhand instead of a shield. Before we get to those three change sets, let’s check out the rest of the trunk changes:

• The glaive of Prune now turns you into a prune when paralysed, petrified, or put to sleep, causing you to take half damage until the effect ends.
• If Jiyva dies Dissolution‘s summon eyeballs is replaced with a cantrip.
• Sewer maps have been updated and re-vamped, plus two new sewer maps.
• Bailey maps have been updated and re-vamped, plus three new baileys.
• New Spell: Enfeeble (L7 Hexes). Enfeeble irresistibly applies weakness and antimagic to a single foe. Additionally the target is also dazed and blinded if they fail a willpower check.
• Formicids now dig at normal movement speed, and each cell dug causes draining.
• Centaur warriors replace centaurs in Shoals.

New and updated Spider monsters

• Pharaoh ants are an undead spider that drains and when killed binds the souls of all nearby monsters.
• Steelbarb worms are fast, regenerative, fire-resistant worms that apply barbs in melee.
• Jorogumo are tough ensnaring monsters with bolt of draining and hornet poison melee.
• Broodmothers summon spiders and bite to summon spiders.
• Culicivora are healing spiders, with heal other and a vampiric bite, appearing in spider packs.
• Sun moths are holy moths with a single tile halo, sticky flame, and energy bolt.
• Radroaches are armoured roaches that cast irradiate, which contaminates the player a lot (not a direct malmutation).
• Demonic crawlers gain warning cry.
• Emperor scorpions are less tough but faster.
• Ghost moths no longer poison but their stat draining is much more intense.

Early Game Artefacts

Artefacts can now generate on D:2-3. Additionally, several new unrandarts specifically designed to be interesting early and then fall off are added:

• Delatra’s gloves heal the wearer for drinking unknown potions and restore MP for reading unknown scrolls.
• The woodcutter’s axe is a vorpal +8 war axe that always swings at 10 aut, regardless of skill, shield penalty, slow or haste, etc.
• The staff of the Meek is a +7 quarterstaff of protection with an extra protective bonus AC when below 55 HP.
• Throatcutter is a +7 long sword of draining with a 1/3 chance to instantly kill foes that are below 21 HP.

Orbs to ponder

This round of updates brings a new item type: orbs. A shield-slot analog of scarves that give no SH and no penalty. Several new armour egos are added that appear only on orbs:

• light: a radius 3 halo.
• wrath: gives *Rage (20% berserk chance).
• mayhem: when the wearer kills something, it has a chance to send a monster that saw the kill into a frenzy.
• guile: reduces the will of the wearer’s target by 3 pips, while reducing the wearer’s will by 2 pips.
• energy: gives a source of passive channeling: a chance to power a spell instead of using the wearer’s MP, with a chance to backfire and drain int or cause confusion. The success chance goes up with each source of passive channeling, and the backfire effect triggers if each source backfires. The staff of Wucad Mu now counts as two sources of channeling (so it stacks with an orb of energy in addition to being buffed!).

That’s all for now. This development cycle is coming to a downslope, most of the big ideas for 0.28 have reached trunk, but of course there are always surprises in Santaeus’ sleigh. So I don’t have horizon prognostication for you about what might appear next beyond the polish, balance tweaks, and bug fixing that make up the later end of the release cycle. Until next time, happy crawling!

The energy of discovery flows out of the trunk update and into your fingertips!

Hello crawlers! We’re getting back to a more regular trunk updates post schedule, but this comes hand in hand with a continued feverish pace of change. Since we last wrote there have been 186 commits to trunk. Unlike last time a much larger fraction of these are fixes, tweaks, and technical behind the scenes work that enable the headliner items.

First, a big congratulations and thank you to longtime community contributor nlavsky and team member advil for initiating and seeing through to completion the implementation of a consumable panel for web tiles, similar to the inventory pane of local tiles. This has been an outstanding feature request for almost a decade, and is the number one reason offline players cite for why they don’t play online. So if you’re a long-time offline player and you don’t mind playing trunk, come check it out; otherwise, we look forward to you trying it during the 0.28 release! In addition to this panel, advil has been doing a lot of work expanding the web tiles mouse support, the second most requested online feature. Try it out!

Since we last wrote, we also had community contributors Aliscans, ArmiesAndCastles, Brian Power, EdDewey, Gopall, Goratrix, Jonathan Klabunde Tomer, Oneirical, Perry Fraser, aMcNicky, mgdelmonte, Zachary Chandler, and sdynet send in various tweaks, fixes, new items, lua api improvements (mgdelmonte is a big driver of these), and other assorted changes. As always, a big thank you to the community for participating in development.

On the gameplay side, the two big headline changes are the Yredelemnul overhaul and a revision of the Wanderer background start. Let’s dive in.

Carry the Black Torch!

Last post I mentioned an experimental overhaul of Yredelemnul looking for playtesting feedback. This overhaul has arrived in trunk, after a set of balance tweaks and bug fixes thanks to your feedback. Here’s what Yredelemnul now offers, instead of permanent ally gifts.

• At 0* Yredelemnul grants passive reaping of living and demonic creatures, as well as recall, and immunity to umbra and spectral mist clouds. Things with a corpse come up as zombies, things without as spectrals (including those poor souls whose corpse was exploded). These reaped creatures stick around until the player leaves the level.
• Piety is proportional to the total strength of reaped dead in the player’s LOS.
• At 2* grants the Dark Bargain active, which trades some zombies/specters for a long-duration undead servant summon. Summon quality scales with piety, and the summon list now covers all (non-harmful) ghoul, skeleton, vampire, and wraith genus monsters (except Vampire magi who belong to Kiku); for console players that’s monsters on glyphs n, z, V, and W.
• At 4* grants Drain Life. Same as old drain life, but now costs zombies/specters as well as mp.
• At 5* grants Bind Soul. Same as old enslave soul, but also costs zombies and has been renamed. Bound souls can follow the player between levels, retain the spells and weapons they had when alive, and are tougher than before.

Wandering About

hellmonk took the charge in re-designing the random generation process of the Wanderer background. I won’t bore you with the old creation model, Wanderer players will know that the bad rolls could just be absolutely nonsensically awful. The new generation model picks three skills in an apt-weighted way: a “good” skill and two “decent” skills. Using these choices it hands out starting gear, “good” stuff for the good skill and “decent” stuff for the decent skill. Finally it assigns stats and skill points based on these choices, again in an apt-weighted way. The result is more lopsided and more likely to align with the gifted items, though it is not guaranteed to be that way. Along with a change to the random model, the possible items have been expanded, with some carried over from the old model. To entice you to check it out, here’s the possible list:

• “good fighting” selects a weapon and gives the good weapon instead. “decent fighting” gives an extra plus to a weapon if one was already given, or a decent potion or scroll otherwise.
• “good weapon” gives a +2 weapon, an upgraded base type or a vorpal branded starting weapon (hunting slings with sling bullets are now possible). “decent weapon” just gives a plain weapon.
• “good unarmed” gives two random good potions or scrolls. “decent unarmed” gives a single decent potion or scroll.
• “good armour” gives either +2 scale, chain, or acid scales to weirdly shaped wanderers. “decent armour” gives either plain scale or ring mail, or aux armour to weirdly shaped wanderers.
• “good shield” can give either a +2 buckler or a +0 buckler of protection (upgraded to a kite shield for species that can’t use a buckler). “decent shield” gives a +0 buckler.
• “good magic school” gives a 3-spell randbook (capped at level 4) from that school. “decent magic school” gives a 2 spell book totaling 4 levels from that school.
• “good spellcasting” gives a 4-spell randbook (capped at level 3), picking spells from any school. “decent spellcasting” gives a 2 spell book totaling 4 levels from any school.
• “good stealth” gives either a +2 dagger and a good consumable or a +0 dagger and atropa and datura darts. “decent stealth” gives a piece of aux armour.
• “good throwing” gives a +2 dagger and curare darts. “decent throwing” gives either boomerangs or poison darts.
• “good dodging” gives either a +2 leather armour or a +0 leather armour and some nets (oddly shaped wanderers get an aux armour instead of leather). “decent dodging” gives a piece of aux armour.
• “good evocations” gives either a wand (weighted towards the stronger wands) with a good number charges or an XP evoker other than the chess piece. “decent evocations” gives a handful of flame or polymorph charges or a piece from Xom’s chessboard.
• The possible range of starting consumables is expanded.
• If starting with the sandblast spell, a wanderer also receives stones.

Trunk Updates

Of course, with 184 commits, even with all of the User Interface work there are plenty of other gameplay changes around. Read on for the mix

• New Unrand: the dreamshard necklace. Concept and initial implementation by community contributor aMcNicky, the dreamshard necklace is an amulet an amulet of nothing that for the most part does nothing. However, on a lethal or near-leathal blow the necklace shatters, absorbing the blow and releasing protective dreams of healing (a big heal, between half and full HP), friendship (shadow creatures), and clouds (fog).
• The ring of the Mage loses Will++ and Int+3 and trades them for Archmagi. Multiple sources of Archmagi now stack, so have fun blasting!
• The autumn katana loses Clarity and trades it for a chance to cast Manifold Assault on hit, slicing through space because it is too sharp. This unrand refresh by community contributor sdynet.
• The monster mix in Dis and Cocytus is adjusted to bring them closer in line with Gehenna and Tartarus threat levels.
• Okawaru’s Duel ability is more expensive, and the post-duel grace period shorter.
• Quazlal abilities have had their costs balanced: Upheaval is cheaper in MP and Piety, Elemental Force cheaper in MP, and Disaster Area more expensive in MP.
• Chain Lightning damage now falls off more quickly with range.
• Yara’s Violent Unravelling can now unravel summons in addition to enchantments. When targeting a summon it causes the summon to explode, killing it instantly. Additionally, it is now smite targeted.
• The briar patch monster now blocks all non-aligned beams, shielding its allies from all hostile fire, while allowing allied beams to fire through them. Bushes allow all beams to pass through, regardless of alignment.
• The infusion ego is buffed, now costing only one MP per hit.

There’s still a lot more brewing on the horizon this trunk season, with a Spider refresh and a lot of new and updated vaults on the way. So until next time, happy crawling!

You go downstairs. The trunk update is left behind to rot!

Hello crawlers! Sorry for not writing, there was a leak in the lava system down here in Gehenna and it was all hands on deck for the Devil’s team to get it contained. Despite the chaos, since the last trunk update there have been a whopping 480 commits to trunk. So buckle up for a meaty post. Before we dive into the details, some headlining information.

First, a warm welcome to Sastreii, who has joined the dev team as a tiles artist and has been prolific in refreshing old tiles and filling in art for the new content that’s arrived in this cycle.

Next, on the horizon in this version are a refresh of the Spider branch and an overhaul of Yredelemnul. Both are currently playable on the experimental crawl.dcss.io development server (not tracked in scoring or Sequell). Playtesting feedback is welcome and wanted on these branches, drop us a line on GitHub, reddit, the tavern, or #crawl-dev on libera.chat if you have substantive feedback based on playing experience. Both sets of changes should arrive in trunk very soon, but they aren’t quite there yet.

Also on the immediate horizon: a combined effort by community contributor nlavsky and team member advil will soon deliver a consumables panel for web tiles. This has been a desired feature for a long time, so hats off to both of them for the effort!

A big thanks to community contributors ManiacJoe and DreamDust for new vaults, as well as to AdamPG, Aliscans, ArmiesAndCastles, Brian Power, David Damerell, Gopall, Implojin, Martin Kennedy, nlavsky, perryprog, Santiago Acosta, dilly, mgdelmonte, paul, and robertxgray for patches with tweaks, bug fixes, balance adjustments, lua improvements, and more since we last wrote.

With all that said, lets dive into the trunk changes!

Branches & Environment

• Exploration-based shaft traps are now limited to one shaft per branch per game.
• Portal vault portal mimics have cackled and vanished for the last time, and are removed.

Character

• Two new Demonspawn mutations:
• The weakening stinger mutation gives a tail aux attack. At level 3 it blocks the cloak slot and the aux attack applies the weak status.
• The demonic touch mutation adds irresistible damage to the off-hand attack. At level 3 it blocks the gloves slot and applies the vulnerable status.
• Player-chosen attribute increases now happen every 6 XLs, starting at XL 3, and increase a stat by 2. Demigods are unchanged.
• Black Draconian Breath no longer includes shock.
• Clarity from any source again blocks *Rage.

Gods

• Ashenzari’s passive trap avoidance and item identification are moved 1*. No more freebies without a curse!
• Cheibriados’ passive poison slowing is moved to 0* and bend time moved to 1*.
• Elyvilon’s abilities are streamlined to be less redundant with one another and with Zin’s sanctuary:
• Pacification grants full XP, and can be used on intelligent plants.
• Lifesaving is completely passive, and is a bonus chance on top of the usual good god chance that becomes guaranteed at 5*, but with a piety-gated timeout.
• Lesser Healing is removed, with Greater Healing renamed to Heal Self and moved to 3*.
• Purification is moved to 1* and is cheaper.
• Gozag’s gold distraction chance is capped.
• Ignis’ abilities are shifted based on playtesting experience:
• Rising Flame is now a one-time use ability, but costs no piety.
• The cost of the other two active abilities is increased to compensate.
• The Sea of Flames ability is removed and replaced with Fiery Armour, a long lasting duration that gives +7AC and causes melee attackers to suffer fire damage.
• Jiyva gurgles merrily and shifts into a new form:
• Stat shuffling, healing and piety from item eating, and cure mutation, are all removed.
• Piety is now exploration based and grows very quickly.
• Jelly healing is replaced with passive HP and MP regeneration.
• Mutation gifts arrive in bursts that attempt to remove a mutation (more likely a bad one) and then max out a good one.
• rCorr is now granted at 2*, and jelly-on-hit at 5*.
• New active ability Oozemancy granted at 3*. Somewhat expensive in piety it temporarily turns walls in radius 4 into slime walls.
• The chance of Ru retaliation is reduced.
• The Shining One abilities arrive earlier, with Divine Shield at 1* and Cleansing Flame at 3*.

Items

• The spawn rate of wands is reduced.
• The electrocution brand now triggers on fewer attacks.
• Regen is reduced to 0.8 HP / turn per pip.
• MPRegen is increased to 0.4 MP / turn.
• The brand weapon chances have been tweaked, and are now described in the scroll’s description.
• The spawn rates of scrolls and potions are adjusted slightly and now described in in-game descriptions.
• New glove ego: infusion. Gloves of infusion add damage per hit in exchange for 2 MP per hit.
• New unrandart: the +3 Mad Mage’s Maulers {Infuse+∞ RegenMP Int-3}. These exchange all of the wearer’s current MP in exchange for bonus damage proportional to the amount of MP used.
• The hat of the Bear Spirit now grants extra bonus HP while berserk (for a total of +100% HP) and reduces the post-berserk slow duration, though it loses rN+.
• Unrandarts that produce allies no longer do so when worshipping Okawaru.

Monsters

• Demonic and Holy monsters are now susceptible to fear, intoxication, and mushroom spores, and are able to go berserk.
• Monsters now have a chance to break a door permanently when opening it to get to the player. This chance is higher if berserk.
• Classed draconians now come in a fixed colour based on their job.
• Plain demonspawn are removed. Each class of classed demonspawn has one mix of demonspawn attributes.
• When Dowan dies, Duvessa goes berserk permanently; when roles are reversed Dowan gains haste permanently.
• Merfolk impalers and javlineers are nerfed slightly.
• Walking Tomes have a summon cap on their living spells.
• Shard shrikes now engage in batty wandering after casting icicle once, as they were meant to.
• On death, Eleionoma and Fenstrider Witches drop a wand if they drop a corpse (similar to a dragon’s hide).

Spells

Within the spell changes, a big chunk of them involve making existing spells scale with power and making sure the power caps for low level spells aren’t too high. Here’s that set first:

• Corpse Rot scales with power, placing more miasma clouds per corpse and placing clouds at radius 2 if all the radius 1 space is already filled.
• Passage of Golubria now has a range that scales with power.
• Blink has a cool down that scales (downwardly) with power.
• Teleport Other, Sublimation of Blood, Spider Form, Inner Flame, Gell’s Gravitas, and Vampiric Draining all have their power caps reduced.

And the rest of the spell changes:

Hello crawlers! It has been a busy month since we last wrote, with lots and lots of new stuff landing in trunk.

First of all, you’ve probably noticed a lot of fresh new looks for monsters and terrain. A big thanks to community contributor Sastreii for the stream of awesome tiles.

The long promised Hell overhaul has arrived in trunk, with a complete refresh of each of the sub-branches and tons of new monsters. nicolae is hard at work on new Hell vaults as well, so watch out! Speaking of vaults, hellmonk has brewed up six new WizLabs for you to loot, or perhaps to die in.

Fighter and Fire Elementalist have both been adjusted – the latter has two new spells, and there are a few other new spells as well. The behavior of random rage from all sources has had a variety of tweaks, and there’s the usual grab bag of other tweaks, changes, and adjustments.

Hell Overhaul:

For a long time, players have let us know that hells are too long (28 floors!) but too easy – a “victory parade”. To fix that, we’ve taken what was fun and challenging about the hells and distilled away the rest. The result is much more lethal, shorter, and a rip-roaring good time all the way through. Changes include:

• Hell effects are divided into timed effects and branch wide persistent effects.
• The timed effects are the same for all hells, and consist of temporary mutation, stat drain, hp drain, and noise.
• The branch-wide persistent effects are:
• In Dis, players have 8 Corrosion (-8 AC and Slaying).
• In Cocytus, potions are frozen solid cannot be used.
• In Gehenna, scrolls are obscured by hellish smoke and cannot be used.
• In Tartarus, Willpower is halved by the sheer horror of the environs.
• In each hell sub-branch, floors 1-6 are shrunk to 1/4 of their original area. (The final floor of each branch, floor 7, is unchanged.)
• Each level only generates a single downstair, with no randomly placed shafts and a limited number of escape hatches.
• Hell subbranches have their monster lists refreshed with a variety of new enemies, replacing things like weak derived undead and so-called “trash mobs”.
• Each subbranch has hellions, tormentors, dread liches, and ancient liches.
• In addition to the cross-hell population, there are revised monster sets in each subbranch.
• Gehenna is now populated by brimstone fiends, hellephants, hell hogs, fire giants, salamander tyrants, balrugs, and three new monsters:
• The creeping inferno stalks the player like a lurking horror, and when it explodes it goes off in a fire storm.
• Searing wretches are ghoul-like monsters that strip fire resistance with their melee attacks.
• Stokers tend the fires of Gehenna, summoning creeping infernos and setting off wind blasts.
• Dis is now populated by hell sentinels, iron giants, caustic shrikes, iron dragons, war gargoyles, buffed iron golems, and two new monsters:
• Quicksilver elementals have quicksilver bolt and antimagic attacks, as well as batty movement.
• Crystal echidnas throw barbs and fire crystal bolts. They’re made of green crystal and are appropriately vulnerable to LRD.
• Cocytus is now populated by ice fiends, shard shrikes, azure jellies, titans, frost giants, freezing wraiths, simulacra, and two new monsters:
• Wendigos have stunning blast, paralyzing victims for 1 turn on hit. They can also turn nearby simulacra into very powerful iceblasts, destroying the simulacrae in the process.
• Narguns hit hard, have a vulnerability melee, and cast petrify. (Watch out – since potions are frozen solid in Cocytus, you can’t quaff cancellation to stop the petrification!).
• Tartarus is now populated by tzitzimimeh, silent spectres, doom hounds, bone dragons, profane servitors, eidola, shadow wraiths, spectral things, and two new monsters:
• Tainted leviathans are undead giants which mesmerise, throw large rocks, and are ringed by miasma clouds
• Putrid mouths are screaming ghosts with miasma breath, strong poison and stat draining melee.

Six New Wizard’s Laboratories:

Hellmonk, with an assist from PleasingFungus and art from Sastreii has brought a whole assortment of new WizLabs for you, including restoring two that were cut in 0.17.

• Eringya’s Formal Garden (previously removed in 0.17) returns with a modified layout, nastier archers, and the addition of some of the swamp monsters that have been added between then and now.
• Tukima’s Studio (also removed in 0.17) returns with a modified layout and several brand-new monster types to complement the dancing weapons: walking tomes, which summon living spells that cast themselves at the player. Walking Tomes also now appear as high-tier enemies in Depths.
• Yara’s Duelist Academy features mana vipers, lots of warrior-mages wielding antimagic weapons, and a fearsome semi-unique Head Instructor who likes to dual-wield triple swords.
• Borgnjor’s Mausoleum features both corporeal and incorporeal undead. Lost souls occasionally appear when monsters are killed, making big fights scarier. A cult of halazid warlocks serve as the final encounter.
• Maxwell’s Workshop features an array of golems and big, meaty workers who wield big, meaty maces. You’ll find some of Maxwell’s cast-off equipment here, perhaps including the legendary artifacts themselves.
• Alistair’s Party Mansion features an array of wizards and their bizarre guests. There’s some good consumables to be had if you don’t mind crashing the party of the century… and wading through statrotting clouds of degeneration.

Spell changes:

• New spell: Scorch (L2 Fire). Hits a random enemy within 3 tiles, dealing fire damage. If damage is dealt, applyies short term rF- to the foe. Cinder Acolytes start with Scorch instead of Foxfire.
• New spell: Flame Wave (L4 Fire/Conj). Flame Wave is a channeled spell (like Searing Ray) that hits all surrounding tiles in ever-wider waves of flame. The initial cast costs 4 MP, and each turn of channeling costs 1 MP. The noise starts a bit louder than a shout, and gets up to fireball level by the last wave.
• New spell: Summon Cactus Giant (L6 Summoning). Summons a jolly green giant, which impales attacking enemies on its giant spines. Appears in the Book of the Wilderness and the Book of Scorching
• Searing Ray‘s power scaling is decreased.
• Storm Form’s power scaling is decreased, but blinkbolt is now always LOS range.
• Bolt of Magma and Corona are now monster only.

The rest of the changes:

• All derived undead keep their reach, constriction, and trample effects.
• New entry vaults, ruin sub vaults, and maps for Desolation
• Red Devils no longer kite, and instead their melee attack inflicts the barbs status if damage is done.
• The Ranger Card now summons rangers from these three types: centaur warrior, naga sharpshooter, deep elf master archer. (thanks sdynet!).
• Ironbound Beastmasters are removed.
• Depths is now 4 floors.
• The experience cost of high-level skills is reduced (approximately equivalent to a +1 increase in aptitude at skill level 23).
• To compensate, late game XP is reduced.
• The top-end two handers have slightly lowered skill requirements for mindelay. Executioner’s axes and bardiches now reach mindelay at skill 24, and triple swords at skill 22.
• Throwing ammunition is reduced.
• Abyssal Knights background stat contribution is changed to 5/2/5 Str/Int/Dex, from 4/4/4.

On the horizon:

That rounds out the changes for this update. Looking to the future is always fraught, but amid the miasmatic haze of Tartarus there are some outlines of a spider overhaul, adjustments to the wanderer start, more efforts to compactify mid-to-lategame, and a host of community and dev-team designed new vaults. Further afield there are rumors of new Bailies, overhauls of Yredelemnul and Jiyva, and perhaps even something about ranged combat. Stay tuned! And until next time, happy crawling!

The trunk update rustles loudly! The trunk update casts itself at you!!!!!!! You die…

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the first trunk update of the 0.28 cycle. Coming fresh out of the gate are a new god Ignis and accompanying zealot background Cinder Acolyte, plus a big new feature for Okawaru and freedom from the summon XP penalty. On top of all that, a new unique Mlioglotl stalks the dungeon. Mlioglotl unique horror with the power to corrupt the level, changing terrain and summoning other abyssal horrors, as well as cause fear. He places in the S-branches and rarely in the Abyssal lair end. Thanks to community contributor amcnicky for the nightmares. Watch out!

Ignis, the Dying Flame

Ignis is a new god who does not appear in the temple. Indeed, altars to Ignis do not place in the regular dungeon at all! Ignis worship can only begin at character creation or from a faded altar. Ignis is dying, and as their last worshipper you are given all remaining power right from the get go.

• Ignis worshippers start at 5* piety (6* if a monk joining from a faded altar).
• Ignis has no piety gain and no piety decay.
• Once abandoned and mollified, Ignis dies and can never be worshipped again.
• Ignis grants the following abilities:
• 0*: Passive rF+
• 1*: Active ‘Sea of Flames’ ability. Creates smoldering embers (like Conjure Flame) on every empty square in LOS. They ignite after the next player turn unless snuffed out by something occupying the cell.
• 1*: Active ‘Foxfire Swarm’ ability. Conjures Foxfire on every open square in radus 2 around the player.
• 2*: Active ‘Rising Flame’ ability. Gives the player the “Rise” status, after 2-4 turns the player rockets through the ceiling and up one floor.

The main way to worship Ignis is by starting as a Cinder Acolyte. Cinder Acolytes are a new background and start worshipping Ignis, along with: a 7/5/0 stat split, a robe, a -1 flame branded weapon of their choice, and the spell foxfire memorized.

Okawaru, god of (single) Combat

In the 0.27 cycle Okawaru gave up on their old honorable ally conduct. That was the beginning of a shift in their point of view on allies, and the god of combat now wants to see you prove yourself a worthy hero alone!

• Okawaru now forbids all allies, as if you had sacrificed love under Ru.
• And gains a new 5* ability Duel. The Duel ability smite-targets a single non-summoned enemy in LOS (which must be threat level “tough” or higher), and transports them and the player to an Arena portal vault. Winning the duel opens a gate to return from the portal vault, and the player will be forcibly teleported back after a short duration.
• Finesse is moved to 4*.

Summoning Changes

For a long time summons have applied an XP penalty, stealing up to half of the XP reward from each kill. This was used as a balance tool, because allies in crawl are very powerful. However, over the past many versions a lot of the sources of ally power (summons attacking out of LOS, sources of permanent, very long lived, or cheap and powerful allies) have been removed. Summoning spells were still extremely powerful, owing to the large number of creatures that could be brought to bear on a problem. In trunk summons and allies are changed in the following way, to enable removing the XP penalty.

• Summon caps are reduced:
• Summon Small Mammal, Summon Hydra, and Monstrous Menagerie are capped at 2.
• Haunt is capped at 8.
• Summon Horrible Things and Dragon’s Call keep their old summon caps.
• All other summon spells are capped at 1.
• Summon-capped summons all time out uniformly and disappear after 10 auts.
• Shadow Creatures is made a monster only spell.
• The XP penalty is removed from all temporary allies.
• Permanent allies from Beogh and Yredelemnul currently retain the XP penalty, with a hope to change their design in the future in a way that allows us to fully remove the XP penalty.

And all the rest

Of course, in addition to big projects there are myriad tweaks, adjustments, and smaller features in trunk. Here’s the latest

•  Ziggurats no longer require a rune of zot to enter.
• The Enchanter background no longer starts with the Corona spell, and instead starts with a potion of invisibility.
• The evolution mutation is revised. Once per XL’s worth of experience it activates, providing a good mutation. Every two activations it reduces its level by one.
• New bad mutation: devolution. Mechanically similar to evolution but dispenses bad mutations and activates once every 1/4th of an XL.
• Strength 0‘s regeneration reduction is replaced with -Regen in monster LOS.
• Intelligence 0‘s 4/5 chance to fail scroll reading is replaced with -Scroll.
• The staff of Battle now triggers the battlesphere on melee hit (in addition to the usual spell trigger).
• All shields now only use Dex for stat scaling.
• The robe of Clouds‘ thunder cloud ability is now passive, placing storm clouds on enemies within range 2 each turn.
• Riposte is removed from long blades and base damage is increased.
• Demonspawn warmongers’ Sap Magic effect now causes a short term -Cast after casting a spell.
• Lesser Beckoning’s power cap is reduced to 100 and range reduced to 5.

What’s on the horizon

That’s all for now, crawlers, but there’s a lot cooking down here in Dis:7. There is a major refresh of the hells underway, discuss play testing feedback on reddit or the tavern! Hellmonk has some hellish new wizlabs nearing completion. PleasingFungus has been at work in his own wizard laboratory and has two new spell designs that might make it to trunk soon. Beyond that, who can say what malicious whims will flit through the devteam’s head. So until next time, happy crawling!

With a burst of heat and light, the trunk updates rocket away!

Hello crawlers! Coming hot on the heels of our previous trunk update we’re back with more of the latest. Before we dive into changes, some exciting scheduling matters:

The 0.27 tournament is tentatively scheduled for July 30th-Aug 15th

As usual, watch this space for links to the tournament webpage, more information about scoring, etc.

While it has only been a week since our last little chat, almost 100 commits have landed in trunk. One significant area of change is to spellbooks, feedback on the feel of this change is most welcome and we look forward to reading your remarks on various crawl forums. With that said, on to the changes!

• Thanks to community contributor Aliscans, wizmode monster creation now has in-game help, for all your monster experimentation needs.
• Archmagi can now appear on randart robes.
• Several unrands have been adjusted:
• Damnation only consumes bolts and explodes on hit.
• the staff of Wucad-Mu has been buffed, refunding MP more often and including the refund even when it backfires.
• the Wrath of Trog is angrier: it now extends your berserk duration on kill (sometimes) and grants Rampage. Raarhrhrhghghghghgh!
• The post-berserk penalty no longer includes paralysis.
• Using Trog’s Berserk now has a piety-adjusted chance to fail.
• Salamander Tyrants, Rockslimes, and Quicksilver oozes have been added to Ziggurat monster sets.
• Several further enhancements to the quiver:
• Potions and scrolls can now be quivered for use.
• Autofight correctly supports “waiting spells” like searing ray.
• New options are available to customize the quiver order
• A new spell: Maxwell’s Capacitive Coupling (Level 8 Air). When cast, the player begins charging up. If the player waits (with ‘.’) and is not moved then after a bit of time (random and depending on spell power) the accumulated charge is discharged, vaporizing the nearest foe (nearest at the end of the spell, not when it is cast!). This might seem familiar, but I’ve got absolutely zero idea where you might have seen the mechanics before.
• Wereblood now only grants its healing for kills of adjacent monsters.
• Felids no longer get a stealth penalty from Blade Hands.
• Everyone else can improve their stealth with a new good mutation that dampens sounds.
• Spell book changes:
• Spellbooks are always identified
• Randart spellbooks have fewer spells
• Fixed spellbooks are split into smaller books of 2-4 spells each, and 30 new books are added to pick up the contents.
• Spellbooks generate more than twice as often to keep the number of spells generated about the same. Book rarity is now more closely tied to the spell level.
• Book pricing in shops is reworked
• Backgrounds that previously started with a spell book are unchanged, their starting spells are added directly to the spell library at game start.

That’s all for now. In the run up to the release and tournament, “feature freeze” is scheduled roughly around July 16 or 23. Before then expect to see many more exciting new vaults reach trunk, both from our new devteam members and from several community contributors; along with balance tweaks, bug fixes, and user interface improvements (including, hopefully, an item panel in the WebTiles UI). Until next time, happy crawling!

Weird images run through your mind. The Trunk Updates vapourize in an electric haze!

Hello crawlers, it has been a while since a post has appeared in this space. While your author has been inactive the rest of the team and the community have been working away in the depths of Gehenna to sift the most lethal ideas from the hellish magma.

First of all, a warm welcome to the two newest players for the Devil’s team: hellmonk–a long time community contributor, fork developer, and notorious memelord. nicolae–another long time community vaultsmith, with a special talent for shop vaults, whimsey, and good quotations. We’re happy to have both of them aboard the team.

Speaking of community contributors, since I last wrote from among the 285 commits to trunk we’ve seen

• A new splash screen by ArbitUHHH
• New tiles from Sastreii, including for demonic trees which inspired a new dungeon feature
• Tweaks and fixes from Goratrix, dilly, nlavsky, and DreamDust
• Specific mechanical input from engine and pubby

New and Improved Vaults and Environment

• Everyone’s favorite lair ending, the Jungle Book, has been overhauled to no longer be a Lua-trigger spoiler. There are still plenty of appearing monsters, brought back from the dead by necromancers that now appear.
• hellmonk has been on fire, adding three new Volcanoes: a smoke and steam themed map, a tribute to the Zot hot tub (beware the orb of fire), and an elven volcano full of pryromancers.
• To cool off, he then added a slime themed new Ice Cave.
• Both hellmonk and nicolae have been at work improving Snake vaults; the first with a new rune vault, and the second with a wide variety of thematic vaults.
• Many old guarded unrand vaults have been tweaked and adjusted, as well as a slew of new ones.
• While not exactly a vault: demonic trees now appear in the Abyss, Pan, and themed vaults. They can be awakened like normal trees but when burned produce a cloud of chaos instead of a forest fire.
• Early out of depth monsters have a shallower maximum depth.

Gods

• Hepliaklqana waits until you have shown enough devotion to earn 1* of piety to bring your ancestor out of the mists of memory (and kindly also waits to impose the HP penalty).
• Sacrifice Experience costs more XP now: the experience cost of skills is calculated with your old XL value, which will have a much longer effect. The sacrifice can now be repeated up to three times.
• Sacrifice words and sacrifice drink grant bonus piety when both are taken (Mummies get the bonus just for sacrificing words.)
• Other sacrifice piety values have been tweaked and rebalanced in various directions.
• Okawaru no longer cares if you slaughter your allies.
• Kikubaaqudgha now gifts spells directly into your library; the capstone grants all of the spells of the Necronomicon and also Haunt once more.

Character

• Djinni aptitudes are adjusted (XP is increased from 0 to +1 and spellcasting reduced from -2 to -3).
• Unbreathing is no longer a mechanic distinct from rPois or holiness type (this applies also to monsters).
• Palentonga can now silence their rolls.
• Wisp form no longer has blinkitis.
• The guaranteed damage reduction mechanic is changed. Instead of being a secret percentage associated with particular armour items, it is an internal calculation derived from AC from any source. For the curious you can read the details, but to quote the LearnDB “If you’re making equipment decisions based on this, please reconsider.”

Spells

• The amulet of the Air loses EV+5 and becomes an Air magic enhancer.
• Monster Bind Souls now always creates a simulacrum when the targeted monster dies.
• Air Elementals lose their twisters, and gain Stunning Burst which inflicts 1 turn of paralysis and is resistible with rElec, stasis, or by dodging the attack (but not Will).
• Ice form‘s AC scaling with power is buffed.
• New spell: Storm Form Level 7 Air/Transmutations. Transforms the caster into a storm, melding all non-jewellery, and granting power-scaling electric cleaving melee, power-scaling defenses, and an activated blinkbolt ability.
• Wereblood grants a small amount of healing on each kill.
• Blade Hands is again level 5.
• Freezing Cloud is now level 5.
• Tornado is re-named and re-flavoured to Polar Vortex Level 9 Ice; the damage flavour is changed to icicle damage and increased.
• Chain Lightning is increased to Level 9 Conjurations/Air, and has its mechanics simplified to be easier to reason about (but still a bit more complicated than a bullet point).
• Poisonous Vapours no longer creates a cloud as part of its mechanical function.
• Absolute Zero and Hydra Form are removed.

Hello crawlers, and welcome to another installment of the 0.27 trunk updates!

A big thanks to nicolae for another big batch of vaults, this time for Spider; to Dilly, ShaperMC, and hellmonk for new ecumenical altar vaults; and to Sastreii for a continued stream of new tiles! Additionally a big thanks to hellmonk for the overhaul to Demonspawn Tier 3 facets:

• The Black mark facet gives the following benefits. At level 1 hex enhancer, level 2 black mark, and at level 3 a radius 1 silence donut around the player (the player isn’t silenced).
• The Damnation facet is adjusted to feel more like becoming a Brimstone fiend. At level 1 the facet grants Will+ and passive retaliation to hex attempts, at level 2 gives 50% torment resistance, and at level 3 hurl damnation (which has some tweaks to its damage scaling).
• A new Chaos facet which gives at level 1 a chance to corrode enemies when you damage them, at level 2 a chance to malmutate enemies when you damage them, and at level 3 an active ability to forcibly blink away and apply negative statuses to enemies in line of sight.
• The Robust and Augmentation facets are unchanged; Passive freeze is removed, and the passive freeze mutation moves into the general pool.

Read on for the rest of the trunk changes:

• New Unrand: the seven-league boots, which grant a full-LOS rampaging effect
• Yredelemnul again permits statue form
• Nemelex’ Foxfire card is renamed “the Swarm” and summons a swarm of bees with size varying on power.
• More salamanders have been placed in Snake rune vaults
• Draconian Knights and Fannar no longer cast Ozocubu’s Armour and have higher base AC.
• Ice elementalists now start with Metabolic Englaciation instead of Summon Ice Beast
• Hailstorm now affects icy creatures
• Wands of random effects are removed, replaced with the XP-charged pieces from Xom’s chessboard, which apply a random effect to a random target in LOS.
• The diversity of early dungeon books is increased.
• Static Discharge is lowered to level 2, and Swiftness increased to level 3.
• Mnoleg loses Random Bolt, to better focus on summoning eyeballs.
• The demonic rune is announced when a vault that is guaranteed to place it is generated.
• The player and their Hepliaklqana ancestor can now fire through one another.
• Major Destruction is buffed and has the list of zap adjusted. Makhleb’s passive heal on kill is reduced in strength.
• Vehumet now supports Poisonous Vapours.

That’s all for now! As always, the future is hazy; there are some big changes proposed by community contributors that are under discussion, as well as some big UI projects under way. One of those projects, by long time contributor nlavsky is nearing completion: it will bring an inventory panel to WebTiles! Until next time, happy crawling!

You make a move on the chessboard. The trunk updates cackle and vanish!

Hello crawlers, trunk is currently as hot as Geh:7 on a hot day with lots of commits coming fast. Since we last wrote over 150 changes have landed in trunk, a mix of tweaks, shifts, new features, community contributions, and bugfixes. As with last time, I want to again highlight our non-code contributors:

• New vaults by beargit, nicolae, and ShaperMC, appearing in various places in the dungeon. If you’re interested in making vaults (prefabricated bits of the map), read an introduction to editing vaults here and consider setting up a development environment to test your vaults.
• New tiles by Sastreii. If you’re interested in making tiles, read our tiles guideline here.

Both kinds of contribution can be submitted on our GitHub repository, either as an issue or a pull request, if you don’t have a mantis account. If the documents seem a little old, they’ll be getting updates in the coming month.

Work on spicing up the early dungeon experience has continued with significant changes to the overflow altar system:

• Each floor from D:1-3 has a 50% chance of placing a faded altar. We need more faded altar vaults! If you’re interested in making vaults this is a good place to start (as are arrival vaults).
• There is a 20% chance of an identified `altar to a random Temple god on D:2.
• Except for the previous two chances, no other altars appear on D:1 or D:2.
• Every “Temple god” receives exactly one guaranteed altar, appearing either in the Ecumenical Temple or in an overflow temple between D:3 and D:10. We also need more overflow temple vaults!

In addition to the changes to altar placement, further adjustments continue:

• Oozes are renamed endoplasms
• Dungeon spawn tables are adjusted to produce more depth appropriate monsters
  and less chaff.
• Ogres and Two headed ogres again attack slowly and hit harder.
• Scorpions are now fast.
• Gnolls on D:1 no longer get halberds.
• Worker ants, soldier ants, and queen ants are removed.

The new Djinni species continues to be tweaked in response to play testing:

• Weapon aptitudes have been lowered by one.
• The scholarly gods now all reject Djinn worship (that’s Sif Muna, Vehumet, and Kikubaaqudgha)
• Spells are guaranteed on level-up: if a starting book spell is rolled the spell gets re-rolled until an available spell is found.

Some changes to the mutation pool:

• All scales except Iridescent scales are now Demonspawn only.
• Iridescent scales, bone plates, thin skeletal structure, and sturdy frame are no longer incompatible.
• Blurry vision is removed, replaced by allowing Ru’s -Scroll while threatened mutation in the random mutation pool.
• Shoutitis and No potion heal are reduced to 2 levels, with the maximum level effect at the top level, and half the effect at the first level.
• A new Jiyva mutation gives player melee an engulf effect, engulfing foes in ooze (gross).
• The blink mutation is removed.

And of course, a grab bag of other changes:

• Manifold Assault is raised to level 5.
• Depths vaults have their monster lists updated to match the spawn table.
• The Vestibule of Hell has its monster list updated to remove chaff monsters.
• Flying equipment, species, and forms cause you to fly at all times.
• Sif Muna’s book gifting rate has been reduced, to make it more feasible to reach 6* piety.
• Blade Hands is now level 6 and appears only in the book of Transfigurations
• Hydra Form is now level 5 and appears in the book of Changes and the Fen Folio
• Heavenly Storm grants bonus EV and is a bit quieter.
• Scrolls of random effects are removed.

That’s all for now. On the horizon: new demonspawn tier 3 facets have come into focus. The winds of freshening continue to blow through branches but just where they’ll go remains mysterious. Until next time, happy crawling!

You feel threatened and lose the ability to read!

Hello crawlers, it’s been a busy few weeks in the cottage industries of the Iron City. This trunk update has several big things, but before we get to them I want to highlight some non-code community submissions since we last wrote:

• New vaults by beargit, nicolae, and Skrybe, appearing in various places in the dungeon. If you’re interested in making vaults (prefabricated bits of the map), read an introduction to editing vaults here and consider setting up a development environment to test your vaults.
• New tiles by Sastrei. If you’re interested in making tiles, read our tiles guideline here.

Both kinds of contribution can be submitted on our GitHub repository, either as an issue or a pull request, if you don’t have a mantis account. If the documents seem a little old, they’ll be getting updates in the coming month.

Diving into some of the other changes that have happened since we last wrote. Several branches have had changes.

Of course, trunk development is not all headline items. There’s been a lot of behind the scenes technical work, bug fixing, and an assortment of other changes. Read on to see what else has changed.

• Wyrmbane now glows when a dragon that can upgrade it comes into view.
• Dexterity and EV formulas are tweaked again.
• Assorted autoexplore edge-case improvements by Aliscans.
• Swamp is now loud.
• Cheibriados no longer hates quickblades.
• Elixir gives both heath and mp at all power levels.
• Zin sanctuary no longer applies holy word.
• Empty space no longer reduces the variance of Airstrike‘s damage.
• Kobold Fighters start with bucklers now.
• Monster weapon delay is standardized at the monster’s speed, certain monster
  base damages are adjusted to compensate. (hellmonk)
• Poisonous Vapours can no longer target empty space.
• Palentonga HP apt is reduced to +0.
• Player poison now ticks much faster.
• Yredelemnul accepts nonliving worshippers again. Return the black torches to your Gargoyles and statuary!
• Halflings are removed.
• Shatter deals bonus damage to toenail golems (youch).

That’s all for now. The future keeps approaching even though we can never see it clearly, but by desperate Aperomancy it seems that the branch freshening trend might reach to Spider or the Hells. More vaults from vault smiths new and old are soon to appear. Perhaps hellmonk’s promised Tier 3 demonspawn changes will materialize? Or perhaps none of these things will happen and this space will show something completely different next time! Until then, happy crawling!

The trunk updates whisper ‘farewell’ as they head to the true west.

Hello crawlers and welcome to the first trunk update of March! It’s been busy here in Coc:7 dreaming up new and varied ways of torturing players. The first thing of note in this round of trunk updates is an Ashenzari overhaul:

• Ashenzari periodically offers followers curses as they explore.
• Curses are applied to equipped items and have the following effects:
• Bind the item to you, so it cannot be removed,
• Increase your piety with Ashenzari,
• and grant a boost to two groups of skills (described when Ashenzari offers the curse).
• Curses can be removed at any time by shattering the chains. This destroys the item, freeing you from the curse.
• In exchange for binding yourself with curses, Ashenzari grants the following benefits:
• Skill boosts granted by your curses grow with piety.
• At 0* Ashenzari reveals a wealth of knowledge: all items (including consumables) are identified, exploration traps are prevented, and portals are revealed.
• Passive monster and item detection and passive mapping, with detection range scaling with piety.
• At 2* See Invisible
• At 3* Clarity
• Starting at 4* passive scrying with radius 2, scaling up to radius 4 at 6*.

Other changes since we last wrote:

• Plain Liches have a new spell set: Bolt of Cold, Orb of Destruction, Slow, Haste and Invisibility; and Ancient Liches trade Slow for Petrify.
• If he spawns on the orb run, Boris will do so with permanent haste and a permanent aura of brilliance, spurred on by his lust for the ORB.
• Airstrike no longer does bonus damage to flying things.
• The obsidian axe cannot be unwielded while mesmerised; watch out!
• Once you complete a Ziggurat, the Zot clock no longer applies.
• The spectral brand has been simplified: The weapon pops out when you attack, immediately follows up, and then sticks around until the end of your next turn. If you hit again, everything repeats. Otherwise, it vanishes.
• Unidentified equipment is now identified when you touch the cell that it is on, instead of on wear.
• The Depths monster list has been trimmed of so-called “trash mobs” for a deadlier experience.
• *Slow as an artefact property now stacks, multiple sources will increase the chances of getting slowed when hit.

That’s all for now! On the ever changing horizon, changes to Snake and the Vaults seem in focus, but it is always hard to see through the impenetrable haze at the border between Cocytus and Gehenna, so who can say, really? Until next time, happy crawling!

Hello crawlers and welcome to the first trunk updates post of the 0.27 cycle. Things have commenced with a shebang! and there are a lot of new changes to report on. This update will have some thematic organisation to highlight several big sets of changes: curse removal, stat changes, monster spellbooks, adjusted demonspawn facets, and two new spells. There are of course all sorts of tweaks, shifts, changes, and new spells. Read on for more!

Curse Removal

The system of cursed items is no-more, courtesy of PleasingFungus who finally found the collective remove curse scroll and read it for all of us. Practically, this means the following:

• All items that generate are uncursed
• No mundane negative-plus items generate on the floor (though some special shops still place them)
• Scrolls of remove curse, rings of attention and teleportation, and amulets of innacuracy are removed.
• Ashenzari is the only source of curses. In current trunk, Ash uses identify scrolls instead; however this is a place-holder and a larger revision to Ashenzari is currently in-progress but not yet in trunk.
• The Scythe of Curses and Obsidian axe now have *Drain instead of *Curse; the necklace of Bloodlust no longer has a swap penalty.

Stat changes

Several tweaks to the stat system (including the impact of weapon stats) have arrived, to simplify the impact of base stats and remove hidden breakpoints and step-downs. Thanks to hellmonk and chequers for the submissions! Along with these changes are some adjustments to species stats.

• Dexterity and evasion no longer have hidden step-downs
• The percentage damage modifier for strength on weapon damage is derandomzied and simplified. 10 strength corresponds to 100% damage, and each point of strength above adds 2.5 percentage points to the modifier (points below 10 remove 2.5 percentage points).
• Demigod base stats are reduced to 9/10/9, and now gain 4 points of the stat of their choice every 3 levels. This will give players almost divine control over their stats.
• Gnolls base stats are reduced to 7/7/7.
• Spriggans lose one point of base dexterity and have their Dodging apt reduced to +3.

Monster Spellbooks

Monsters with multiple distinct spell books have had their spell sets combined into single sets. For a couple of monsters with multiple iconic sets, new monsters have been created to carry the torch. The full set of changes can be perused in the pull request, here are some of the highlights:

• Psyche has a new, more insane, spell set. She can cast Polymorph, Chain of Chaos (hi Xom!), Invisibility, and Cantrip.
• The named lords of the hells and pandemonium who summon demons now summon demons specific to their realm: Cerebov only summons fiery demons now, Ereshkigal only tzitzimimeh, and Dispater only hell sentinels.
• New monster: Dread Lich. Ancient liches now have an earth-conjurations spell book with LCS and Corrosive Bolt, but lich summoned demons are a classic. Enter the Dread Lich, with Summon Greater Demon, Paralyse, Invisibility, and Haste; appearing in the same places as ancient liches.
• Deep elf mages are removed, replaced with deep elf pyromancers (who have a fire-themed spell book) and deep elf zephyrmancers (with an air-themed spell book).

Adjusted Demonspawn Facets

Thanks to hellmonk for continued demonspawn improvement work! This latest round of mutation changes focused on the tier 2 facets, with the following adjustments and a new spellcasting-focused facet (combine with Big Brain “scales” for a truly demonic mage experience!).

• The mana link facet is re-ordered. The first rank increases MP Regen, the second rank provides guardian spirit, and the third the mana link.
• Foul stench generates miasma at every rank of the facet (scaling with rank) as well as miasma cloud immunity.
• The damage curve of spines is adjusted to be a bit better at high level.
• Ignite blood now ignites blood at every rank of the facet, with power scaling on rank.
• Demonic guardians are summoned when the player takes damage, and the tier of the guardian grows with level.
• The icemail facet shifts from pure AC to AC+SH; at rank 1 it grants a condensation shield for 4SH, with ranks 2 and 3 granting 4 AC of icy armour each.
• A new facet: malignant magic. Demonspawn with this facet attempt to paralyse foes in a radius equal to the rank of the facet whenever they cast a spell; at rank 3 this extends to include wand usage. The power of the paralysis depends on the level of the spell cast.

New Spells

PleasingFungus has developed two new spells aimed at generating new incentives to hybridise.

• Animate Armour. Level 4 Summoning/Earth magic. “Call forth the spirit of your armour, bringing forth a slow-moving ally that hits harder the heavier your armour is. Wham, pow! (Summon limit is 1, as with CCF.)”. Animate Armour appears in the book of Earth and the book of Dreams.
• Manifold Assault. Level 4 Translocations. Manifold Assault launches attacks with your melee weapon against 2-4 random enemies in LOS, depending on spellpower. Manifold Assault replaces Passage of Golubria in the book of Spatial Translocations, and appears in the book of the Warp (along with Passage of Golubria).

The rest of the changes

This has been an active month for trunk, and there is a lot more going on. Read on for the rest!

• Storm clouds no longer make noise; making Qazlal worship quieter at low piety.
• Regeneration is buffed; one pip of regen grants 1 HP per 10 auts (a normal turn). This is 2.5x as strong as it was before.
• Trolls and Vine Stalkers are adjusted slightly to compensate.
• Monsters with ranged weapons now have unlimited ammo. No more running that stone giant out of large rocks. (Except nets; infininetting gnolls are reserved for gnollcrawl.)
• Phantoms have less HP, and now blink the player with them when they blink from attacking.
• Big Kobolds are re-named Kobold Brigands and always spawn with darts (one third of the time curare, yikes!). Normal kobolds can no longer spawn with curare (though they can still pick it up from the ground, if you’re very unlucky!).
• Ranged targeting shows to-hit chance, and a monster’s to-hit chance can be seen in xv.
• Haunt moves from the Necronomicon to the Grand Grimoire
• Scarves of shadows no longer act as a spell de-enhancer
• Wands of disintegrate are now called wands of mindburst, and do not work on mindless creatures.
• Manuals no longer require an inventory slot; once picked up they boost skill aptitude until used up.
• Hats and Gloves can spawn with the stealth ego.
• Wands of random effects are de-spoiled, applying a random buff or debuff to the target (15% chance of a buff), with the list of effects visible in the description.
• Ozocubu’s armour and Frozen Ramparts now break on any player position change.
• Ozocubu’s Refridgeration is now level 7.
• Stone arrow damage is increased.
• Monstrous Menagerie no longer summons harpies.
• Summon Demon and Summon Greater Demon are removed as player spells.
• Gadget shops are removed.
• Rings of Stealth and Boots of Running are removed.

That’s all for right now! In addition to the Ashenzari changes, on the horizon are more demonspawn changes, refreshes of Vaults and Snake, and new vaults from returned vaultsmith nicolae—plus who knows what other twisted horrors we can dig out of the abyss. Until next time, happy crawling!

Updating is recommended for all players. Happy crawling, and report more bugs here!

Congratulations to Yermak, perennial champion, for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with 95,456 points! Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 47 games, including a streak of 16 games, 29 Nemelex’ Choice combos, an XL 13 win, 3 species high scores, and 3 background high scores. In second place was EnegeticOcto with 80,792 points and 38 wins, including 29 Nemelex’ Choice combos and a 28 minute 17 second real-time win, the fastest of the tournament. Rounding out the top 3 was booing with 78,169 points and 38 wins, including the first win of the tournament, 50 minutes and 27 seconds after the start, an XL 16 win, 3 species high scores, and 2 background high scores; they also collected every banner!

Our top three took several of the top spots in the individual category rankings, but they weren’t the only players on the leaderboard. Acrobat set a high standard in Win Rate and Streaking, playing and winning 22 games over the course of the tournament, for the top streak and an adjusted win rate of 95.65%. Behind Acrobat in Win Rate was DrMan with a 20 game streak. For much of the tournament Acrobat and DrMan were engaged in a high-stakes back and forth at the top of this category. The Nemelex’ Choice competition ended in an impressive 3-way tie, with Yermak, EnegeticOcto, and Shummieall winning 29 Nemelex combos for points over the course of the tournament. Yermak blew away the competition for Combo High Scores, with 329 points in the category; booing was the only other player to earn more than 200 points in the category, finishing second with a score of 226. The Best High Score of the tournament was the 72,401,124 point run by iamserjio. In the Lowest Turncount Category, Caminho won with 3 runes in 8,617 turns, the 7th lowest turncount of all time! EnegeticOcto’s 28:17 win was the Fastest Realtime Win, but Shummie was only 33 seconds behind with a 28:50 win. Felids were the weapon of choice for the Low XL Win category; Yermak’s XL 13 cat was followed by CurlyBrace who won at XL 15. The tournament was herladed by booing, who posted the first win 50 minutes after the tournament start. DrMan followed an hour later with the first all rune win. The Ziggurat Dive was an exciting back-and-forth for much of the tournament, until Sentinel decided to clear a definitive 100 Ziggurats. Finally, in seeking the favor of the gods, booing was the only player to collect every banner over the course of the tournament.

The clan competition was won by Irradiated Dongers (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 88,667 points. Following very close on their heels were Gozag or Stay Home (captained by Ge0ff) with 88,333 points. Rounding out the top three was TeamSplat (captained by Shummie) with 72,456 points.

Most of the clan categories take the best score of the member, so I won’t recap those. The Nemelex’ Choice competition was a collective effort, and each of the three-way individual tie members were on different clans, which led to a very high scoring clan competition. Gozag or Stay Home came out on top, with other clan members contributing 30 more Nemelex Combo wins on top of Yermak’s 29, for a total of 59 clan nemelex points; following were Irradiated Dongers with 52 and TeamSplat with 50. The Combo High Scores competition was similarly astronomical at the top; Gozag or Stay Home earned 533 points in the category, followed by Irradiated Dongers with 449, and Make Beogh Great Again with 392 points. These three clans were also the only three to collectively earn every banner.

Thank you to everyone for playing. The rules were adjusted after 0.25 based on collected feedback, and once again there are feedback threads on the tavern and reddit.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.25 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,760 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,333 completed a game in a non-boring way. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.25 statistics.

• Players: 2,333 (0.25: 2,772)
• Total player time: 29,392 hrs (0.25: 34,433 hrs)
• Average player time: 12.6 hrs (0.25: 12.4 hrs)
• Games played: 54,701 (0.25: 62,125)
• Players who got a rune: 886 (0.25: 1010)
• 476 winners and 1767 wins (0.25: 548 winners and 1871 wins)
• Win rate: 3.23% (0.25: 3.01%)
• Proportion of players using WebTiles: 96% (0.25: 95.9%)

The 0.27 season has begun, and it again looks to be an active trunk season. Watch this space for further information as the 0.27 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.26 features a new Palentonga species that has a rolling attack and gets bonus AC after getting hit, a new Delver background that starts the player on D:5 with a variety of escape tools, a reworked Swamp branch with new monsters and other layout changes, and a vastly reworked quiver system that lets spells, wands, and abilities be quivered, fired, and autotargeted. Additionally, food is gone, replaced with a Zot clock that prevents players from lingering too long in one branch. The Kobold species now has the Nightstalker 3 mutation, the Ghoul species has chunk eating replaced with heal-on-kill, and there are a bunch of reworked spells, monsters, and items (including nine overhauled unrandart weapons). As always, there are dozens of new deadly vaults, and many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.26 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon (Update: The Linux debs are now available). See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts today in just a few hours at 20:00 UTC Friday 8 January and runs through 20:00 UTC Sunday 24 January, with all online 0.26 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or set-up a clan. Clans membership can be changed until 20:00 UTC Friday 15 January.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to DCSS 0.26 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

Aaron Golden, AdamPG, Alex Jurkiewicz, aMcNicky, Anders Papitto,
Byrel Mitchell, CrawlCycle, Elliot Dronebarger, Emily, Eugene Abramchuk,
Gittourarmy, Goratrix, Heinrich Ody, hellmonk, Implojin, Joe
Childers, Kieron Dunbar, Marcelo Henrique Cerri, mgdelmonte,
Midn8, Naruni, nikheizen, Nikolai Lavsky, Paul Pollack, Peter
Gerlagh, Peter Hurst, Petri Salminen, Quipyowert2, randomMesh,
RJ Cunningham, Roderick Schertler, Cebolla Sunbeam, Ryan McNeive,
sdynet, Sebastian Łużyński, Shummie, Skrybe, syranez, Umer
Shaikh, ukdong99, wjchen

Ho ho ho hello! Santaeus has rolled up from the North Pole with a box of beastly trunk changes for all you good crawlers out there on the net.

The major highlight is the new quiver system, written primarily by advil. A quick overview:

Any ranged attack, spell, ability, or evokable action can be quivered! This change change lets a wide range of things appear in the quiver slot for quick access via firing, autofiring (p and shift-tab) and cycling (( and )); use Q to select an action. At the same time it introduces a number of UI improvements and new options.

For the gory details, check out the updated documentation or read the pull request summary and discussion.

Here’s what else is new in trunk:

• Net traps are now permanent, but the nets always mulch (no more net farming!).
• Translocations miscasts now prevent movement altogether for a short time (like Tree form!).
• Player spell damage and spell accuracy are now displayed in the UI in various easy to find places.
• Hailstorm now hits automatically (instead of having a very small chance to miss).
• Several ghost vaults have been revamped to have better loot and better theme.
• Palentonga can now mutate longer rolls.
• Skills can now be trained at any time, without item or spell restrictions.
• The revamped Swamp has seen various balance tweaks and adjustments after play testing, including:
• Goliath frogs are now a bit slower,
• Will-o-the-wisps cast marshlight more often.
• The chance for the distortion brand to banish has been reduced.
• The ancient pharoahs have asserted their right to title, greater mummies are now royal mummies.
• Evocable invisibility now drains skills, whether or not you successfully vanish!
• Magic Resistance has been renamed to Willpower (with the abbreviation changing from MR to Will).

Hello crawlers, and welcome to another update from the fires of Geh:7. This stretch has seen a mix of gameplay and infrastructure changes, both with contributions from the community, as well as bug fixes and tweaks from Goratrix, chequers, and Implojin. If you’d like to help out in the effort of developing crawl come by ##crawl-dev or check out our GitHub for how to contribute!

On the gameplay side:

• Palentonga’s HP aptitude has been increased to +1
• staves of earth now deal higher damage, but with the shrapnel effect of being affected 3 times by AC.
• staves of conjuration now deal irresistible damage that checks AC (taking Earth’s old effect).
• staves of summoning and wizardry are removed.
• The Controlled Blink spell has blinked right out of the game, and is removed.
• Blink scrolls no longer cause Contam.
• The Orb’s translocations interference is reduced: blink scrolls can be used in Zot and on the Orb run, as can Passage of Golubria. However, passages are shorter lived and less accurate under the Orb’s influence.
• The various plants and fungi of the dungeon are now much weaker, once hit they begin to wither and die in 3-5 turns. The exceptions are bushes and briars, made of stouter stuff.

On the infrastructure side:

• wjchen sent us a community contribution to improve WebTiles glyphs mode font handling. This introduces two new options for customization, glyph_mode_font and glyph_mode_font_size, for all you WebTiles glyphs players.
• The window drawing loop has seen some optimizations.

Hello crawlers, and welcome to another round of trunk updates from the frigid winter wastes of Falls Creek Coc:7.

This week has seen a fair share of bug fixing, including from community members Goratrix and Naruni. If you’d like to help out in the effort of developing crawl come by ##crawl-dev or check out our GitHub for how to contribute!

Let’s take a look at what else has been woven into the next illusion version:

• Gauntlet monsters now generate awake
• A new round of unrand revisions has begun in earnest:
• Wucad Mu no longer provides evocable channeling. Instead, with a chance depending on evocations, it refunds the MP cost of the spell. There is a chance of confusion or intelligence drain (which scales on spell cost and evocations skill) when a spell is refunded.
• The cloak of the Thief is changed from +Fog to *Fog, creating fog when the player is hit.
• The Majin-Bo loses Archmagi, and instead gives a chance for any cast spell to be vampiric, healing the caster for damage done to living creatures.
• The shield of Resistance is now a +2 kite shield {rF++ rC++ MR++}.
• Rampaging can now appear as an artefact property on all armour types. Enjoy your rampaging octopodes, courtesy of Implojin!
• Staves of energy are removed.
• chequers has finished his project to add cloud rings to Pandemonium lords. There’s now a chance that pan lords will come with a ring of one of the following clouds: flame, ice, thunder, chaos, mutation, draining, acid, or miasma. The chance is much higher for melee pan lords, and the cloud will often flavorfully match the pan lord’s melee brand. Watch out for Faroclos, armed with a chaotic touch and surrounded by clouds of chaos!
• Not content to let chequers have all the fun, first-time contributor amcnicky sent in some new Pandemonium lord tiles.

There’s much more planned before we arrive at 0.26, so stay tuned for the latest and don’t hesitate to get involved yourself. Until next time, happy crawling!

The trunk update sneers, “Beg for mercy, thou defiled idle-headed gnoll-tail!”

Hello crawlers, and welcome to another round of trunk updates, fresh from the Citadel in the Iron City.

The biggest change this week is the introduction of the malevolent chronology of Zot. One of food’s many (badly executed) purposes was a forward progress clock; in the absence of any such clock tedious optimal strategies crept in, of the kind that we on the devteam categorically prefer to prevent (check out the philosophy section of the manual for an elaboration). The Zot clock is a rather loose clock, but should you tarry too long Zot will find you, and rapidly end you. The hope is that this clock is sufficiently loose that only the most egregious behavior gets caught by it. Since this is trunk there will be further tuning.

Read on for the remainder of the tweaks, shifts, and ever seething chaos of trunk

• Contamination now decays three times faster.
• Scarves of shadows now only reduce LOS by 1, instead of a multiplicative factor.
• The rat skin cloak is changed from evocable +Rats to a passive *Rats, summoning rats when the wearer is hit.
• Ripostes no longer trigger hydra-head chopping, *Rage, or Minotaur headbutts.
• Phantom Mirrors and Boxes of Beasts now recharge on XP, mirrors have a single charge and boxes have three charges.
• A new misc evoker condenser vanes replace wands of clouds. Condenser Vanes have 4 charges and create clouds on and around monsters in view, with the clouds scaling in power similar to the old wand of clouds.
• Wanderers now have a chance to start with any of the XP charged misc evokers.

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the last trunk updates post of July 2020.

The past month saw some giant changes to crawl; in the past week things have slowed down a little bit, and some of the devteam’s focus has shifted to interface and polish while the dust settles. For our visually impaired players, this means some new accessibility improvements:

• A new boot ego: rampaging comes to us from Implojin. Boots of rampaging cause the wearer to take an extra step whenever they move in the direction of a foe (whether they want to or not!).
• Thanks to rjcrjc, Kobolds now have the Nightstalker 3 mutation from the start, while Demonspawn no longer have the Nightstalker facet as an available mutation.

• Artificers no longer start with a spectral club; farewell to the brief experiment.
• Item stacks are now fully visible from anywhere in LOS, and no longer require visiting.
• The Cloud Mage has learned to fly.
• Beastly Appendage now merges only helmets and boots, not the full set of aux armour.
• Formicids can no longer use Wu Jian martial moves while digging (sorry twelwe).

Hello Crawlers, and welcome to a charming round of trunk updates fresh from the ever churning chaos of the changelog abyss!

The big news this update is that the long awaited Charms overhaul has arrived. For many years the devteam has tossed around different ideas for what to do with charms, and the school had become quite thin and unfocussed because of a fundamental tension: pure buff spells don’t fit well with crawl’s MP and tactical systems. Some forks experimented with various “permabuff” systems that reserved max-MP, but to us these felt more like items. The result of all this is that the Charms school and skill are no more. The remaining spells in the school have either moved to other schools of magic or to item effects. Without any charms to cast, Skalds have sung their last and are removed. Here are the spell changes:

• Ozocubu’s Armour is now Ice only.
• Swiftness is now Air only.
• Death’s Door is now Necromancy only and Level 9.
• Excruciating Wounds is now Necromancy only, prevents unwielding your weapon for the duration, and applies a Wizardry penalty as well as noise.
• Battlesphere is now Conjurations only and its targeting has been adjusted to work with all Conjurations school spells other than Servitor.
• Song of Slaying is now Transmutations and renamed Wereblood; the noise is reduced somewhat.
• Infusion, Shroud of Golubria, Spectral Weapon, Darkness, and Ring of Flames are removed.

Then there are the new or revised items that take up some of the old charm effects:

• Gozag no longer offers flight potions in petition and occasionally offers lignification.
• Viewing a monster with xv now shows to-hit chance with your current weapon.
• The “view stack/pickup key” ; can be pressed twice to force autopickup even in unsafe situations.
• Beastly Appendage now melds auxilliary armour slots, weapons, and shields, and gives two levels of both Horns and Talons (octopodes keep their tentacle spike) instead of randomly choosing.
• Alistair’s Intoxication prompts when nothing in view can be affected, always applies Vertigo when successful, and has a higher power cap.
• Sticks to Snakes is removed.
• Palentonga charge now provides a to-hit bonus as well as the damage bonus.

That’s all for now. Still on the horizon is a look at Kobolds; for a preview look out for the kobold-nightstalker experimental on CPO and possibly coming soon to CKO. Beyond that who knows what might emerge from the seething chaos! Until next time, happy crawling!

As the wereblood boils in your veins your song becomes a howl!!! 

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the first trunk update of the 0.26 cycle. There’s been a flurry of activity in trunk since the end of the tournament, and I’m excited to bring you the latest from Geh:7. Before diving into the details, I want to highlight two major changes that arrived just as this post was going to press, as well as something that’s unfolded over the past week.

The first is a new species: Palentonga. Palentongas are a two-armed, four-legged, scaled mammal species the size of a horse. Their special power is the ability to curl into a ball and launch a rolling charge at enemies, dealing extra damage proportionate to the distance traveled. Palentongas have flat melee apts, slightly weak spell apts and fairly weak ranged apts. They have +3 base AC and extra HP, along with an aux attack – an upgraded tail slap. They wear bardings (which have been merged into a single item type, shared with nagas). Stats skew towards strength and away from dex, to give the ‘large race’ feeling. Palentonga have deformed body and bad armour/dodging apts. In the Lore, Palentonga are an up-and-coming power, displacing the orcs, trolls, and ogres of the eastern wastes. Their generals ride elephants into battle, goading them forward with spiked ankuses.

The second is a new background: Delver. Shaft traps are fun. What if you had a background that started shafted all the way to D:5, and needed to find their way back up to survive? To make it fair, you start with a nice set of consumables: a wand of digging, scrolls of mapping, fear, and fog, and a potion of haste.

Finally, several aspects of the game have been touched with the long-hungered for removal of food and hunger mechanics. That’s right, no more eating, no more butchering, no more spell or ability hunger, and no more rations.

What happened to Ghouls with the removal of chunks? Well, read on gentle crawler, read on…

• Crimson Imps no longer spawn in D, and Shadow Imps less often (not at all after D:10); in their place White Imps and Ufetubi chase adventurers.
• Shadows and Wights no longer spawn in Crypt; replaced with flying skulls, necromancers, and wraiths.
• Spider is now ambiently quiet, apart from the unsettling clatter of chitin.
• Evocations skill no longer grants max MP.
• Banishment (from Lugonu or distortion) grants full XP.
• Wizards have been renamed Hedge Wizards; they now start with a dagger and 2/6/4 stat modifiers.
• Conjurers start with -1/10/3 stat modifiers that Wizards used to have.
• Assassins have been renamed Brigands.
• Ghouls, no longer able to eat chunks, now heal when they kill the living.
• Centaurs have galloped out of the game and are removed.
• Deep Elves‘ bow aptitude is increased to +3 for all you longbow enthusiasts.
• Nemelex has removed the shaft card from their decks, and the self-banishment chance from the exile card.
• Amulets are now slow to equip; guardian spirit, acrobat, and reflection no longer need to attune to the wearer.
• Pikel’s minions are now lemures, demons that depart this plane if you free them from Pikel.
• Spiny Frogs have been renamed Cane Toads for the authentic Australian experience™.
• Pandemonium lords’ spells and melee flavours have been adjusted; melee focused lords have now learned a few position-altering spells so watch out!
• Hungry ghosts hunger no more, because they’re removed.
• Conjure Ball Lightning now summons a fixed number of balls, with damage scaling with spellpower.
• Necromancy ally spells have been adjusted:
• Animate Skeleton and Animate Dead animated remains have a reduced duration. The durability of skeletons and zombies produced by these spells scales with spellpower. Animate Skeleton now animates the nearest skeleton, without requiring the caster to stand on it.
• Death Channel spectral things have a reduced duration, and all spectral things vanish when Death Channel expires.
• Infestation scarabs have a reduced duration.
• Aura of Abjuration, Recall, and Summon Butterflies are removed.

This post is going to focus on the results. First, a few highlights from the player and clan results. For comprehensive results with first through fifth place winners in all categories, please see the tournament overview page.

The winning player was Yermak with 5,819 points. Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 44 games, including a streak of 17 games and a low-turncount world record of 8,783 turns (Sapher, the previous record holder has reclaimed the throne with a post tournament 8,331 turn win). In second place was shummie with 4,235 points and 20 wins, including the lowest XL win with an XL 15 SpEn and a 52 Ziggurat mega-zigging character. Rounding out the top 3 was Flugkiller with 3,513 points and 14 wins, including the first win of the tournament 35 minutes and 32 seconds after the tournament started with a duration of 35 minutes and 12 seconds.

The new tournament format divided scoring in to several categories, and our top three took several of the top spots in these categories. They weren’t the only players at the top of the leaderboard. Yermak maxed out the Piety category, championing and winning every god over the tournament. The Unique Harvesting category included player ghosts, and by diving Ziggurats for player ghosts ehdcjf2142 won the category with 1,332 points. Long time crawl dev elliptic topped the tournament Win Rate category, with an impressive 90.91% adjusted win-rate, winning all 10 games played over the tournament. Yermak had the longest streak, and tied for second place were GordonOverkill and MrMan with 13 game streaks each. Acrobat was the master of Nemelex’ Choice, winning 25 choice combos over the tournament. Yermak also took the Combo High Scores category with 62 points (21 combo high scores, 20 of which were won, 4 species high scores and 3 background high scores), followed by aperiodic with 34 points (17 combo high scores, 6 of which were won, and the Spriggan and Ice Elementalist high scores). It should be no surprise that Yermak continues to top category leaderboards, with the highest score of the tournament (56,717,235 points); followed by Flugkiller (51,589,384 points) and aperiodic (45,485,504 points). I already mentioned Yermak’s turn-count world record; EnegeticOcto came in second place for best turn-count win, completing a game in 10,320 turns itself one of the lowest turn-count runs of all time. p0werm0de topped the fastest real-time win category with an impressive 24:20 win. Our top players were also at the top of the Low XL-win leaderboard; shummie at XL 15, Yermak at XL 16, followed by EnegeticOcto and sentinel who both posted XL 17 wins. Flugkiller heralded the start of the tournament with his first win; the first all-rune win came from p0werm0de a mere 40 minutes after that. shummie and Flugkiller topped the Ziggurat Dive leaderboard, followed by ehdcjf2142′s 26 consecutive Ziggurat dive for 3rd place. Finally, Ge0ff and shummie were the only two players to complete all tier 3 banners both finishing the tournament with a perfect Banner Score.

The clan competition was won by TeamSplat (captained by mandevil) with 7,007 points who topped the Piety, Harvesting, Combo High score, and Banner Score categories, as well as had several top players (including shummie). They were followed by FSTVLKers (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 6,563 points and Stick to Your Gods (Yermak’s one-player-clan). Overall 142 clans scored points in the tournament (compared to 143 in the 0.24 tournament).

Several of the clan categories simply gave the clan credit for their best player’s performance in a category, so I won’t recap those. The Piety, Unique Harvesting, Combo High Score, Nemelex’ Choice, and Banner Score categories were scored as a collective effort among clan members. In the Piety category, FSTVLKers, Make_Beogh_Great_Again, Stick to Your Gods, and TeamSplat all championed and won every god over the tournament. TeamSplat topped the Unique Harvesting category, followed by FSTVLKers and Gozags Lazy Faire fiscal policy. TeamSplat also finished first in Combo High Scores, followed by Stick to Your Gods and BLACK LIVES MATTER. FSTVLKers took the trophy for Nemelex’ Choice winning 31 Nemelex’ Choice combos between them, followed by Make_Beogh_Great_Again with 27 combos. Finally three clans completed (as a clan effort) all tier 3 banners to tie for first in Banner Score: TeamSplat, FSTVLKers, and Gozags Lazy Faire fiscal policy.

In both the individual and clan categories competition was fierce. Flugkiller came out to an early lead with his first-win points, and throughout most of the tournament held close to Yermak from 2nd place, until being edged out by shummie in the final days of the event. The Clan category followed similarly, with a fierce battle between Flugkiller’ FSTVLKers and mandevil’s TeamSplat (which had shummie as a member).

Thank you to everyone for playing, for your patience with the delayed start, and for your bug finding in the new tournament pages. I hope you enjoyed the new format, and look forward to reading your commentary in the discussion threads on the tavern and reddit.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.24 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,947 players started a game and earned a point in some category; of those 2,772 completed a game in a non-boring way. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.24 statistics.

• Players: 2,772 (0.24: 2,880)
• Total player time: 34,433 hrs (0.24: 35,422 hrs)
• Avg player time: 12.4 hrs (0.24: 12.3 hrs)
• Games played: 62,125 (0.24: 63,048)
• Players who got a rune: 1010 (0.24: 1046)
• 548 winners and 1871 wins (0.24: 540 winners and 1930 wins)
• Win rate: 3.01% (0.24: 3.06%)
• Proportion of players using WebTiles: 95.9% (0.24: 95.5%)

DCSS 0.25 features an overhaul of many spells to make spell schools more distinct and positioning more relevant for spell users, a simplification of the miscast system for when those new spells go wrong, a new style of acquirement scroll, and numerous user interface improvements including new options designed to make crawl more accessible for visually impaired crawlers. For a full list of significant changes, please see the changelog for the 0.25 branch.

Download DCSS 0.25 here (updating momentarily) or here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available now. (Debs coming very soon.)

The tournament starts today, 20:00 UTC Friday 12 June with all online 0.25 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or set-up a clan. Clan membership changes remain open until 20:00 UTC Friday 17 June.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to DCSS 0.25 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

aaronegolden, AdamPG, Alex Jurkiewicz, Andrew York, Benoit Giannangeli, Byrel Mitchell, Clare Boothby, David Damerell, Emily, Gabriel Marks, Goratrix, hellmonk, Implojin, István Markó, James Buck, kitchen-ace, klorpa, Nathan Mills, mwvdev, Nikolai Lavsky, nirrattner, Peter Gerlagh, Psymania, Quipyowert2, riverfiend, RojjaCebolla, sdynet, Skrybe, shummie, theJollySin, Umer Shaikh, zuurr

Hello crawlers and welcome to the last featureful trunk update of the 0.25 cycle. We’re entering into feature freeze today, the remaining time before the 0.25 Release and Tournament will be devoted to bug fixes, balance tweaks, and polish—as well as implementing a new tournament scoring system. You can give your feedback on the proposed new system on the tavern. Tentatively the 0.25 Tournament will start on either May 29 or June 5, depending on the implementation of the new scoring system.

So as you oil up those tab keys and clean your monitors, lets look at the very latest round of changes you’ll face in the upcoming release (stay tuned for the full 0.25 changelog! edit: since this post is getting shared and continues to be confusing to people reading it out of context; this list is not a 0.25 changelog, but rather a trunk update covering just the last few weeks or so):

• Abyss exits that spawn from earning xp can spawn after the initial spawn, instead of every subsequent spawn being a downstair.
• A few Nemelex cards have changed:
• The Pain card no longer summons flayed ghosts, instead it torments monsters at high power (not the card user, though)
• The cloud card now places vision obscuring black smoke instead of damaging clouds
• Tins of Tremorstones are now an XP charged evocable with 3 charges that scales with evocations and automatically targets the center of all visible monsters. Wands of Scattershot have been removed.
• Several amulet, scarf, and cloak egos have been shuffled or adjusted:
• Gourmand, Harm, and Rage amulets are no more.
• Amulets of reflection now attune at full HP and give +5 SH. Additionally, piety is now properly given for reflected missiles, banishment, and poison damage.
• Scarves of cloud immunity and spirit shield are removed; new scarf egos harm and invisibility are added.
• Invisibility cloaks are no more (you need a scarf for that now!); cloaks can now grant stealth or preservation (corrosion resistance).
• Jewelry with plusses now get constant plus values: strength, intelligence, and dexterity rings give either +6 or -4; protection, evasion, and slaying rings give either +4 or -4.
• Summon Lightning Spire now places the spire on a random square.
• Malign Gateway tentacles can no longer attack out of LOS and appear sooner after casting.
• Scrolls of acquirement are now cancelable, allowing you to fully inspect your character, stash, etc. before making a decision. When you reread the scroll, you’ll get the same choices until you make a final selection.
• Leech is now a (cosmetic) sloppy eater: large hits will sometimes turn monsters into large blood explosions!
• Sceptre of Torment can now be used with spectral weapon. You’d just better be undead unless you want your spectral weapon to torment you!
• An ASCII screenshots section has been added to morgues, and a screenshot is made there every time you take a note with the : key.
• Target acquisition for the Foxfire and Conjure Ball Lightning spells has been improved so they only acquire targets within player LOS.
• Formicids can no longer cast the spell Swiftness.
• The option auto_butcher defaults to true and the option auto_butcher_max_chunks now defaults to 10.
• The option explore_auto_rest now defaults to true.
• Several usability improvements for visually impaired players have been implemented.

Hello crawlers. The 0.25 development cycle continues apace. Expect an announcement about a forthcoming release and tournament within the month.

This round of updates comes with an overhaul of the spell miscast system, to couple with the magic overhaul of this version. Miscasts have been thoroughly simplified, to the point that the effect of miscasting a spell can be included in its description! Read on for details and the scoop on the latest from the Iron City.

• Zot traps have had their effect flowchart replaced with an effect table with a more focused list of awful terrible things to do to the player.
• The Wu Jian Council met in executive session and tweaked some of their martial arts. Wall jumps move only to the ‘a’bility menu, movement triggering is no more. Whirlwind attacks no longer pin. Heavenly Storm has had its slaying mechanics simplified.
• With miscasts simplified Xom now finds them boring and has turned their attention to summoning more demons on low level players.
• As a prelude to the miscast changes several gods no longer use miscasts in their retribution. The new wraths are:
• Trog replaces fire miscasts with pure fireballs in her fiery rage.
• Lugonu exchanges translocations miscasts with a chance to banish, summon Abyssal things, or teleport the penitent to nearby monsters.
• Cheibriados replaces miscasts with a chime on their clock before putting the player to sleep at high tension, and stat damage at low tension.
• Fedhas’ elemental damage is now more focused: a corrosive bolt, a primal wave, or a thorn volley await those who would trample the flowers.
• Yredelemnul prefers the simplicity of a bolt of draining to necromancy miscasts.
• Kikubaaqudgha will still impose necromancy miscasts on those who attempt to use necromancy while under penance; for outright retribution they now apply the same ancient and terrible death curses used by mummies.
• The scythe of Curses also replaces necromancy miscasts with death curses.
• The distortion brand no longer teleports on hit; unwielding a distortion weapon has a chance to teleport the unwieldier to nearby monsters, contaminate, or banish.
• Regeneration items (troll armour, artifacts) must attune to a player before granting their effect. No more carrying TLA to swap while resting!
• Mummies have consulted the book of death and determined that necromancy miscasts no longer suit their vengeful needs. Death curses are now their own effect table, separate from miscasts. Kikubaaqudgha was involved as well, and still protects loyal followers from curses.
• New monster: nameless horror. Nameless horrors are brought into the world by summoning miscasts, have an antimagic attack and abjure other summons as a natural ability.
• Absolute Zero has been reduced to a fixed range of 5 (up to 6 with Vehumet), the noise now scales with power down to 0 at maximum power.
• Leda’s Liquefaction regains its slow movement penalty, but the caster remains immune to its effects on melee combat.
• Deflect Missiles has been removed. The tedious-but-optimal armour-wizardy-int dance has danced its last!
• Lesser Beckoning and Teleport Other now turn allies hostile.
• Tukima’s Dance cannot be used by Ru followers who have sacrificed Love.
• Two new Gauntlet maps are live: one presents a sequence of arenas, after each you can chose to press your luck or turn and face the minotaur. The other has a choke point in the sequence: there is only one middle arena in the three-arena-sequence to the minotaur.
• Miscast effects have been simplified. When miscasting a spell, the player receives magical contamination, and if the miscast is bad enough an additional effect that scales with the spell’s current failure chance. These effects vary by school as follows (compare to the old miscast effects, which could you even correctly lists all of them without a source dive?). For damaging effects the damage message is punctuated like other damage messages.
• Charms and Hexes: debuff and slow
• Summoning: durably summon a nameless horror
• Translocation: dimension anchor
• Transmutation: polymorph
• Conjuration: irresistible AC-ignoring damage
• Elemental schools: school flavored damage (Earth magic does fragmentation damage like Lee’s Rapid Destruction).
• Monsters on D:1 are now back asleep, after briefly getting into the coffee.

We occasionally get asked about opportunities for competitive crawling outside of the official release tournaments. Several community members have organized a variety of competitions, and this post aims to point them out.

The Tavern Dart Board

The Dart Board on our official forums is a clearinghouse for community organized competitions as well as discussion of all things competitive crawl. It’s a good first place to go when looking for ongoing competitions and challenges.

The Crawl Cosplay Challenge

Run by kitchen_ace, these challenges give character conducts inspired by crawls many uniques. From the CCC website, “The goal is not to emulate the unique’s behaviour exactly, but to get a good starting point on playing games with interesting requirements. Challenges [...] are suitable for players of all skill levels — the Challenge is about personal achievement rather than competition.” Check them out! The current set (Set 10) is ending, but a new one will begin soon.

Crawl Sudden Death Challenges

Organized in an officially unofficial way by me, based on the popular series originally organized by WalkerBoh, he idea is for players to compete by trying to do as well as possible in a game of Crawl with one attempt only; if you die, that challenge is over. More information and sign-ups can be found on the CSDC website.

DCSS Secret Santa Tournament

Organized by CPO admin chequers (who also offers a weekly challenge seeded run on CPO), this festive adventure comes once a year. Keep an eye out next year when the temperatures start to rise and summer gets into full swing.

• A new swamp worm tunnel vault offering a transporter puzzle for your death enjoyment
• A new Fedhas vs Yredelemnul themed swamp rune vault with a cameo by an undead Lernean Hydra
• On the back-end we’ve added catch2 testing to the build process
• Foxfire no longer damage the player when swapping, just dissipate
• A new abyss-escape themed ghost vault
• Regeneration has regenerated for the last time, and is removed. Agony replaces it in the book of Necromancy, and Ozocubu’s Armour in the Book of Battle
• A new unique Maggie enters the dungeon. Maggie is a younger version of Margery, and is a test of reaverb’s new multiple-unique-encounter storytelling approach. Maggie knows Bolt of Fire and Mesmerise, and comes equipped with a light dragon skin and a good weapon. Margery’s dragon armour is upgraded. Both Maggie and Margery have a chance of carrying Wyrmbane, which comes already slightly leveled up!
• dtsund can send us an “I told you so!”. Scrolls of acquirement now offer a choice of 4-5 items: food (if you eat), gold, and three random choices from the old acquirement categories. These items are fully identified, and you can inspect them before making your choice.
• However, the miscellaneous category of acquirement has been removed, so you won’t be seeing evocables on the list ever again!

That’s all for now! On the horizon, there are rumors of an upcoming crawl sudden death challenges “soon”, more magic changes, and who knows what manner of twisted sinister changes from the mind of Xom. Happy crawling!

The magic changes were aimed at three goals: better differentiate among the magic schools, increase positional considerations in using spells (better differentiation from ranged attacks), and better UI. The changes are in trunk now but will continue to evolve over the 0.25 development cycle as more play testing feedback comes in.

So without further ado, here are the changes (and the spell schools themes).

• Fire spells are centered around semi-controlled explosions and setting things on fire.
• A new spell Foxfire (L1 Conjurations/Fire) conjures two foxfire projectiles that home in on the nearest target and burn them. Foxfire replaces Flame Tongue, which is removed.
• Conjure Flame now creates a cloud of embers at the caster’s position. They ignite into flame if, after the player’s next action, nothing is in the embers cell; or if the player casts the spell a second time.
• Inner Flame creates a flame cloud under the affected monster whenever they take damage in addition to the explosion on death.
• A new spell Starburst (L6 Conjurations/Fire) fires a range 5 bolt of fire in each of the principal directions. Starburst replaces Bolt of Fire, which is removed.
• Throw Flame is removed.
• Firestorm, Ignition, and Starburst now burn trees, and all squares of a Fireball burn trees as well.
• Air is bouncy, pointy, and often hard to direct.
• Airstrike damage now scales with the number of unoccupied cells adjacent to the target.
• Earth is directed and single target.
• Borgnjor’s Vile Clutch is now a range 6 beam of hands, instead of a smite-targeted 3×3 explosion.
• Ice is diffuse and subtle.
• A new spell Hailstorm (L4 Conjurations/Ice) creates a ring of damaging hail at distance 2 and 3 from the caster. This damage is partly physical but icy monsters are immune. Hailstorm replaces Throw Icicle which is removed.
• Ozocubu’s Refrigeration is buffed to do more damage and not damage the caster.
• Throw Frost and Bolt of Cold are removed.
• Ice Elementalists no longer start with conjurations skill, the extra skill being put into Ice Magic instead.
• Conjurations are pure magic which have good accuracy in some way.
• Iskenderun’s Mystic Blast is now Conjurations/Translocations and makes a range 2 explosion around the caster that damages and pushes back monsters, potentially causing damaging collisions.
• Dazzling Flash (L3 Conjurations/Hexes) replaces Dazzling Spray. The flash is a range 2-3 silent explosion with a chance of blinding monsters (it does no damage).
• Searing Ray now follows the chosen target; the rays all penetrate, are fired to full range, and have the same damage and to-hit.
• Spellforged Servitor only receives one player spell, the highest level servitor-compatible spell the player has. The spell description indicates which spell the servitor will cast.
• Force Lance is removed.
• Poison is an alchemical discipline, focused on poison and other alchemy.
• Sting is now a range 3 Poison/Transmutations spell that is only partially resistible.
• New spell Eringya’s Noxious Bog (L6 Poison/Transmutations) grants the caster a temporary “Bog” status, which causes them to transform terrain behind them into toxic bog. Toxic bogs impose the penalties of shallow water and do partially resistible poison damage of the same flavor as sting to monsters and players in them.
• Venom Bolt and Poison Arrow are removed.
• Ignite Poison is added to The Young Poisoner’s Handbook
• Venom Mages now start with Transmutations skill instead of Conjurations.
• Necromancy has begun transitioning into more of a melee-support school (either the caster’s or their undead minion’s melee).
• Agony and Dispel Undead are now range 1.
• Bolt of Draining is removed.
• Corpse Rot creates miasma in a ring around the player (using one corpse in LOS per cloud).

A bit about the development of these changes 

Just reading the change summaries blog might not give a clear impression of where and how crawl changes come about. For the curious, here’s the story behind these magic changes.

The desire to differentiate crawl magic schools from one another and from ranged has been around for a very long time. About a year ago, based on some player conversations, I started a brainstorm thread on Tavern with the goal of generating some specific ideas for approaching these goals. After some time letting the results of the brainstorm simmer over the summer, in late September I wrote an initial design doc (which has since been revised and now isn’t exactly up to date with the final implementation) and shared it with the same Tavern thread as well as the devteam for initial feedback and shaping. After iterating on the raw design implementation started in October, continuing through mid-November. Early during the implementation phase several more dedicated players compiled early drafts and gave initial feedback, as well as the usual input from the rest of the devteam.

By mid-November the branch was mostly stable in its initial implementation, and I moved into the next phase. chequers (CPO admin) and floraline (CKO admin) were kind enough to set up online versions of the experimental build; sdynet (community contributor) distributed a playable executable in the Korean rogue likes community and translated feedback. I also created play testing posts on Tavern and the DCSS subreddit. Over the next three weeks the changes were tweaked, adjusted, and occasionally significantly changed as a result of this testing, shaping them up to the version that arrived in trunk on December 1st. As long time players are well aware, arriving in trunk is not the same as “finished for all time”, so these new and revised spells will continue to evolve.

With this brief history written, I want to extend my thanks to the members of the community who gave input and helped out. Making large changes to crawl is a tricky business and a team effort always comes out better. I am of course grateful to my fellow devteam members for their input (especially advil, gammafunk, ontoclasm, and CanOfWorms who made part of the changes). I also want to thank:

• sdynet for collecting and translating feedback from the Korean community
• chequers and floraline for hosting experimental branches
• hellmonk, tealizard, Doesnt, EN0N, Bacchus, minmay, kitchen_ace, and members of the Korean community (sdynet did not include usernames in their summary) for specific ideas to improve the branch.

• Chaos branded weapons now can cause might or agility effects, no longer cause spell miscast effects, and the clone effect now creates either hostile, friendly, or neutral clones.
• The Elemental staff is now a spell enhancer for all elemental schools. It counts for each elemental school separately, so spells that use more than one element get doubly enhanced by it.
• Elyvilon’s Divine Protection from death becomes guaranteed at ***** piety, instead of the previous unrevealed piety value between ***** and ****** piety.
• Trog no longer gifts ammo or launchers, and (aside from unrandart gifts) only gifts melee weapons either with no brand and a higher enchant or one of these three brands: vorpal, flaming, or antimagic.
• Crawl Lua gains the ability to interface with the targeter system; for you advanced Lua scripters.
• Renouncing your religion can now be done while silenced
• Monster wands and quivers are displayed in ^x and xv, and there are better warnings for quivers, wands, and dangerous brands held by dual-wielding monsters when multiple monsters come in to view.
• Poison level indicators have been added to tiles, and corresponding descriptions to console.

To read about magic changes, click through to the next post. Until next time, happy crawling!

• Various bug fixes from the 0.24 tournament. The 0.24.1 bug fix release is coming soon.
• Monster clinging has finally lost its grip and is now removed
• Boris will now pursue you on the orb run
• While hostile guardian golems were great ways to make the game harder, summons now dismiss when attacked instead of becoming hostile. The exception is Greater Demons, who are none to pleased to be bothered with your mortal issues.
• Local tiles gains monster threat level indicators which can also be enabled in WebTiles with the tile_show_threat_levels option.
• Fedhas now protects your plants from collision damage.
• On the back end,
• aidanh’s long running ui overhaul has made significant strides
• Monster pathing code has received some optimizations, which should reduce lag when stepped from time. (Cheibriados regrets the need for haste).
• Carrying corpses has been removed again.

Looking to the future, my positional attack magic experiment has grown and twisted. It’s just been merged, details will appear in the next trunk updates post!

DCSS 0.23 features an overhaul of the trap system, a new Gauntlet portal thrown down to replace Labyrinths, a complete revision of Nemelex Xobeh, nine certified-pre-owned refreshed unrandarts plus one new unrandart, and support for seeded dungeon play. This is all in addition to dozens of new fatal vaults, some refreshed monsters, UI improvements, and many more smaller changes. For a full list of significant changes, please see the changelog.

Download DCSS 0.23 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available now.

The tournament starts 20:00 UTC Friday 8 February with all online 0.23 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or set-up a clan.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to DCSS 0.23 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics.

Brent Adams, AndSDev, Beargit, biasface, bjobae, Matthew Boeh, David Candido, cws, Doesnt, Erich Erstu, Floodkiller, floraline, freepotion, Ge0ff, GenericPseudonym, Aaron Golden, Max ‘Ploomutoo’ Hon-Anderson, ICC, johnstein, Alex Jurkiewicz, Nikolai Lavsky, Jean Martel, Johannes Maier, Jacob Meigs, mgdelmonte, Muffindrake, NormalPerson7, Aaron Olowin, palyth, psywombats, RealzHS, Sandman25, Umer Shaikh, Stenella, WanderingBlade, ximxim

Happy Crawling!

And now, the latest from the depths of Gehenna.

• Clear runed doors replaced most runed doors.
• An experimental seeded dungeon mode has been implemented, allowing for plays through a pre-generated dungeon. See the new manual section “Seeded play” for further information.
• Tengu now gain permanent flight at XL 5, but no longer apply their flight evasion bonus to evasion from rings and artefacts.
• Nemelex’s Storm card now unleashes a fearsome blast of wind and electricity, instead of clouds and an elemental.
• The xv display now shows monster spell ranges.
• An extra pane has been added to the religion screen for Ashenzari, Beogh, Gozag, Hepliaklqana, Nemelex Xobeh, and Wu Jian; displaying god specific extra information.
• Spell damage punctuation now reflects the damage done in the same way as melee damage.
• A new unrandart demon trident has been added, the +8 demon trident “Rift”, distortion branded with a reaching range of 3 and smite-targeted attack. Thanks to aolowin for the concept and first draft!
• The Singing Sword has been taking voice lessons, and now sings more often and with greater vigor.
• The circus has come to Zot, with new klown and carnival vaults; watch out for the klown kars!
• Grate traps have been removed.
• The traps in the Tomb have been overhauled, toned down in places and toned up in others.
• High Elves have been removed again.

Space warps horribly around the trunk updates!!!!! The trunk updates disappear!

If you can fix one of these bugs send us a pull request on GitHub, be sure to follow our coding conventions and be aware of the process described in the contribution guide. Happy hacking!

1. 11706 Little-known and misleading behaviour with polymorph on ugly things,
   shapeshifters, undead
2. 11782 i_feel_safe despite having monsters in view
3. 11833 Wand of Digging targeter on Barachi is too short.
4. 11839 Potion Petition ignores “no potion heal”
5. 11836 No warning for Demonspawn when reading scroll of Holy Word
6. 11831 Transmutation spells can show max duration
7. 11806 Weird interaction between Shadow Step, Nightstalker (?) and dispersal trap
8. 11792 Issues when initially worshipping Jiyva
9. 11825 Passwall/Nemelex gifting messaging
10. 11758 If a mummy is killed by Grand Finale, the wrong character location is passed to death curse handler
11. 3734 Fast travel down on bottom level gives wrong message
12. 11705 Monsters who are immune to nets do not display that, when the net is thrown with ‘F’
13. 11701 Guardian Golem clouds don’t dissipate when leaving LOS
14. 11649 Put bazaar items on top of shopping list.
15. 11522 Autoexplore ignores enemies behind traps
16. 11310 False warning when trying to use lightning rod through mushroom.
17. 11463 Tengu flight EV bonus is applied after equipment EV bonuses.
18. 11381 Yellow draconians in forms have rCorr according to % screen but not A screen.
19. 11374 Petrify should show on death messages in the same way as paralysis.
20. 11315 No friendly fire warning is displayed while using Damnation with portal projectile
21. 11306 Trying to put on incompatible armour in forms results in unhelpful message of wrong item type.
22. 11814 Pain’s message inconsistent against invisible creatures
23. 11738 Setting a confirm_action for an ability generates a Y/N prompt every time the ability menu is opened

Hello Crawlers, and welcome to the last batch of Trunk Updates for the year.

• Nemelex Xobeh has removed decks from your inventory, placing them into three abstract piles.
• Deck rarities are removed also. Card power is determined entirely from piety and invocations skill.
• In the place of deck items Nemelex provides three abilities “Draw Escape”, “Draw Destruction”, and “Draw Summoning”, which pull from abstract decks that Nemelex occasionally adds cards to.
• Triple Draw works as before, though the piety cost is increased.
• Deal Four deals four cards from a chosen deck (or all remaining if fewer than four remain), discarding the remainder of the deck, and costs no piety.
• Stack Five constructs a stack from five cards drawn from a choice of decks, which are then put in order. The stack can then be drawn from later, like a fourth deck. Stacking again discards an existing stack.
• The Velocity card no longer hastes enemies at low power.
• Ashenzari now protects followers from exploration-based trap effects
• Qazlal has extended cloud immunity to the elementals created with Elemental Force
• Console players can now see cloud duration provided by new display character types; see options_guide.txt for the exact values to customize.
• The skin of Zhor gains See Invisible and a passive Metabolic Englaciation effect. Chilly!
• Giant size creatures (monsters and players in dragon form) no longer tear through webs
• The require function in crawl Lua has been renamed crawl_require to allow local builds to include the Lua package library without conflict.
• Several spooky new ghost vaults are haunting the dungeon
• Cozy new 7×7 Gauntlet arenas are available to die in.

The trunk updates glow with a rainbow of weird colours and disappear!

Hello crawlers, it’s my pleasure to bring you another edition of trunk updates. It’s been a busy two weeks in Coc:7 and there are a host of new changes.

• The ancient gears shift one last time and the Labyrinth transforms into the Gauntlet
• Gauntlets have the player choose a path through several combat arenas, each of which contains (sometimes exotic) monsters and loot.
• Arena access is one-way using transporters, and teleports are disabled.
• All paths lead to the minotaur who guards the exit and a pile of treasure.
• Gauntlets are found where Labyrinths previously generated.
• Traps have been overhauled
• Traps on the floor are always revealed
• A new trap: the dispersal trap blinks everything in sight when triggered
• Alarms are now like Zot traps, and always mark the player when triggered
• The powers of Zot have gained the ability to trap you as you explore: every tile revealed has a chance of causing you to fall down a shaft, set off the alarm, or be teleported to nearby monsters.
• Elyvilon’s Heal Other targeter now shows the chance of pacification.
• Blowguns display a chance to affect the target in the targeter.
• The robe of Clouds has been upgraded, and is now +3 {+Thunder rCloud rElec}, providing evocable thunder clouds.
• Confused monsters now get a 1 in 3 chance to move normally, just like players.
• Deep water, lava, and the Temple no longer trigger exploration based effects (piety gain and explore traps).

You fall through a shaft! The trunk updates crumble behind you.

Let’s start off with some miscellaneous changes that come from categories that aren’t big enough to merit a separate heading.

• Wanderers’ starting spell libraries are listed in the
  message log on game start, and logged to the character log. They also
  start with a level 1 spell memorized if they start with exactly one
  such spell.
• New tiles: monster spell icons, shock serpent, dream sheep,
  mana viper, Azrael, Dispater, Robe of Vines; plus a new splash
  screen.
• Confusing touch can now be used with a weapon.

Levels

• A vast and terrible array of new vaults (over two hundred) has been
  added, touching most branches of the dungeon, including new ghost
  vaults, new transporters, vaults that place early manuals, and much more.
• Many old vaults have been adjusted to prevent unnecessary vetoing,
  allowing them to place with greater frequency.
• The concentric octagons layout has been added to Snake and Lair,
  and the cave pools layout (with some parameter changes) has been added
  to D.

Monsters

• Grasping Roots is now a smite-targeted constriction
  effect.
• Jorgrun has learned this new Grasping Roots spell, and can
  spawn in Swamp. Watch out for the Roots/Iron Shot wombo-combo.
• Orb run spawns are more frequently near the player and more
  dangerous.
• Pandemonium lords’ spell sets and attack brands are revealed
  when you meet them.
• Monster equipment is identified when you see the monster (including wands).

Items

• Stash search can now search by handedness.
• Butchering always leaves a skeleton.
• Wand charges have been reduced, according to the following
  schedule of average charges per wand:

  Wand	Before	After
  digging	12.5	5
  enslavement	12.5	8
  paralysis	12.5	8
  polymorph	12.5	8
  flame	24.5	16.5
  random effects	24.5	16.5

• The following fixed artefacts have been changed:
  • The Singing Sword is now a vorpal double sword, its sonic damage effect triggers on 50% of hits (including ripostes) and is considerably higher.
  • The Spriggan’s Knife now carves into the realm of dreams, and all backstabs are as if the target were asleep.
  • The Robe of Misfortune is no longer an item identification trap, and is now a +5 robe with *Drain *Corrode *Contam Harm *Slow and EV+5.
  • The Sceptre of Torment is now a pain branded eveningstar that torments on 1 in 5 hits but does not torment the wielder. It gains a new tile too!
  • The Arc Blade’s static discharge effect now casts the spell once (instead of using a special custom version) and has had its enchantment bumped to +8.
  • Finisher trades Str+3 for a chance (based on monster toughness) to instantly kill and explode the target.

Technical

• MS Visual Studio can build crawl again.
• Crawl’s Lua API has been documented, at least the portions available from your options file. Read the docs here.

That’s all for right now, so until next time: happy crawling!